I’ve watched my company begin to understand that they can cancel software projects. From what I can tell this is relatively new to the culture. Though no one truly likes to be on a cancelled project, it’s a whole lot better than delivering a project 3 years later that doesn’t even have a single customer.
So in the last month I’ve seen at least two projects cancelled:
- One because a third party software system coming online duplicated the custom application functionality. This one got canceled after the first Sprint had kicked off, but better than nothing.
- Another because the business drivers behind the project have evaporated. This was a successful project with multiple phases delivered, but they’ve now decided that the lowest priority phase is not worth doing and that the product is complete.
Both of these are signs that we’re starting to get Agile a bit and that we’re understanding the power of failing fast instead of marching along to an inevitable disaster.