Define and commit to the challenge

What a nightmare it would be for a team of mountain climbers to get halfway to the top of a
mountain only to discover that (a) they are climbing the wrong mountain, or (b) the mountain is
growing taller as fast as they are climbing it. Amazingly, this is the nightmare that many project
teams experience in real life!
The single greatest cause of project failure is the tendency for people to wade into a project
without first nailing down the project scope, objectives, and constraints. As a result, they set
themselves up for two types of disasters. First, they may expend significant time, effort, and
money producing a deliverable and then find out that the customer wanted something very
different. Second, they are very likely to experience “scope creep” – the tendency of the
customer to keep revealing additional requirements as the project progresses. In either (or both)
case, the team is destined to fail.
The good news is that this problem can be prevented by the develop...