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: Sinofsky’s Recommendations : What should Sinofsky do? : From 1980 to 1989, Microsoft’s annual sales increased from less than $1 million to over $800 million. The widespread success of Microsoft Office has created a time of extraordinary turbulence and transition. They seem to be experiencing what is commonly referred to as destructive creation. What had been value creating for extended periods of time, suddenly becomes obsolete and superior and novel replacements spurt forth. Change is occurring at an ever-accelerating pace and it’s getting hard to meet exponentially growing public expectations. : Problems determining the exact nature of the project : Public assurance from the various shareholders, stakeholders, and miscellaneous managers surrounding the project did not seem to be honest indications of the real situation. Each of the four main political groups should provide truthful assessments of the project. This seems to be hard to do in the present political company environment. Important concerns are not dealt with early on. As we learned from chapter 7 the best time to deal with these concerns is before the project begins. Basically there seems to be a problem getting through to the constituency who are talented at knowing what information is relevant. : How is the daily build process measured? : This “daily build” seems to be the heartbeat of the project. This system seems to makes it easier for the Project Manager to physically observe the behavior of the software and makes it more difficult to hide whatever problems are plaguing the project. The question is are the project managers physically observing the “daily build”? Or are they really settling for weekly, monthly or semi annual builds? : It seems like they are trying to measure inch-pebbles using this incremented delivery method. To me there is nothing wrong with that. If it works it works. But use the right tool for the job. Normal circumstances call for measurements by the month or week so getting staff consciousness to change will be cumbersome if not difficult. So was the daily build implemented on the first day of the project? I doubt it. : Summary : The number of large user groups involved with the design is too great. It’s becoming an uncontrollable political amoeba. The members are mostly those the business can spare, they seem to be continuously arguing amongst themselves because they all don’t really know what’s going on. Making it hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. People, people, people the three most important things you need on any project. Get the best, keep them and loose the rest! You can work with a team of lesser size if there good and if there that good the will adopt a common useful process. :

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