The Web industry is broken. Web development and online marketing services are wrought with mediocrity and failure. A self perpetuating cycle of misaligned and missed expectations have become the norm. We can do better...we MUST do better. The very survival of the art of professional grade Web services depends on it.

It took several years to adequately define the problem and several more to find the better solution. Now we feel we have found it. Maybe it is not the perfect solution, but one that is much better than the norm. Over the next few blog posts I will share the concepts that have lead to significantly more successful projects characterized by increases in efficiency, lower risks, more innovative work, and higher client satisfaction.

A little history
The great thing about getting older is you get to tell everybody about the good old days. By good old days I am talking about the roaring 90’s. It was a grand time. An age where all the kids were doing Java, the Rational Unified Process was all the rage as the ultimate method for software planning and companies threw money at problems – big money.

During the 90’s I got the privilege to work on some large projects run by the best and brightest in the business. As a human factors engineer I got to be a part of several six figure planning processes and as a developer I got to continue to be on the team of the ensuing seven figure implementations. Big budgets, Big Design Up-Front (BDUF), exceptional waterfall project management, large teams complete with exhaustive testing and seasoned IT clients. It was the age of “nobody got fired for hiring IBM”. It all came together to produce a chain of successful projects.

Then the party ended in 2001. Suddenly we found ourselves in a world of small budgets driven for non-technical clients with thousands of new agencies seemingly up to the task. Suddenly we were in the age of George Forman devotees with their “I am not going to pay a lot for that website” slogan.

Actually, it was not all bad. I always felt the big budgets of the 90’s were Dilbertesque. They were bloated with endless committees to plan every detail ad nauseam. The 21st century would be more efficient. Thus we setup to perfect Midsized Up-Front Design (MDUF) – a slimmed down, more efficient version of BDUF. Investment would be more intelligent. It would be used to produce more efficient results and of course the savings and increased revenue would be reinvested to drive even more ROI driven projects. As it turned out...not quite.

In 2001 and '02, nobody bought strategic planning. In '04 through '07 many companies starting asking why their website wasn’t producing any real results. The answer often time was there was little strategic through put in up front. So some enterprising companies started to seek out a modest level of planning. Luckily MDUF was there to serve that need.

By 2006 & '07 we had evolved MDUF to a highly refined process. Still project delivery success rates were not where we wanted them. Roughly 50% of projects went well, coming in on time, on budget and in scope. A quarter of projects were only slightly over budget, in the 10% to 25% range. However, there were a few, roughly 1 in 4 that went significantly over budget; often times 2x or more.

In most industries an average cost overrun of 25% would put them out of business. However, we felt pretty good about our averages given the discussions we had with other agency owners, developers, project managers and contractors. It seemed that they were doing even worse. Nobody seemed to have a great answer, so we worked even more diligently to refine the process.

In early 2008 it was decided that MDUFs vision documents and wireframes were not enough. More detailed functional specs were needed to further reduce risk and assure iron triangle delivery (on time, on budget and to scope). It was time to dig back into the rigors of the Unified Modeling Language (UML). Future projects would be tightly fixed by the addition of a comprehensive set of use cases, activity diagrams, interface diagrams and class diagrams.

That decision kicked off a journey of discovery that landed us at the optimal destination. That destination however was at the complete opposite end of the spectrum then was originally planned…

Learn what you can do to end the insanity

photo by didmyself