Stepping Stones not Milestones
Successfully delivering on long-term engineering projects often requires structuring them around stepping stones that deliver concrete value and illuminate “unknown unknowns” rather than arbitrary milestones that only serve as project checkpoints.
A mythology often develops around successful large engineering projects. We celebrate the end results and reflect on the positive steps taken to get there but quickly forget about all the missteps and uncertainty along the way. These “moonshot projects” teach engineers a terrible anti-pattern: Large projects addressed via completely disjoint phases of design, execution, and delivery.
The solution to delivering on complex projects without over-engineering, over-resourcing, over-designing and overly risk-taking is often re-scoping the project into a cleverly formulated set of stepping stones.
Sometimes glimmers of genius can emerge from the darkest of places. Regarding an inability to link Iraq to Weapons of Mass Destruction, in 2002 Donald Rumsfeld said:
