So why would I attribute the top ten list from yesterday to incomplete discovery?

Every program (or product, or service, for that matter) has three stages of life - discovery, implementation, and operation. In reality, most of what people focus on when it comes to program/project management is the implementation stage. Maybe a bit of operations focus tossed in at the end to mollify those who will be running the results of the implementations (at least those that are not completely canceled!) It's not a surprising reality - people will do what they are incented to do.

Discovery is the stage that is usually left incomplete - or completely left out - in the rush to get to the finish line. Very few people like creating documentation, and even less like reading it. Even fewer can correlate the various bits of incomplete data into a cohesive view of the environment. And time lines are generally not built with discovery issues in mind.

Which brings me full circle to the idea of understanding the environment. First rule of information management can be summarized as "garbage in, garbage out". Is it really a surprise that when efforts base their implementations on data that is incomplete or assumptions that are no longer relevant, they fail at a prodigious rate? Invisible requirements? Scope Creep? Budget and resource challenges? Unrealistic time lines? Of course those lead to compromises in quality and features - even as those features are delivered late. So the sponsors get sub-quality features that don't necessarily match up to the features they need to deliver on their business promises, and they don't get those features in a timely manner. No wonder sponsors disappear!

OK, enough of the soap box. There are methods to quickly digest all of the environmental variables and integrate them into a cohesive road map. If only people would use them :)