HIPPO Errors – HIPPO stands for “Highest Paid Person’s Opinion” – this is a type of project mistake that happens in hierarchical, top-down organizations where control and decision making is concentrated at the top of the organization. Decisions are not made by the most qualified person (that would be MQPO, certainly not as clever!) but are kicked up the line to a senior level person who probably has no qualifications to make such a decision. Most senior managers are generalists, they may have been specialists a long time ago, but no more.

Technical and project decisions are complex and should be made by the most knowledgeable person. Avoid HIPPO errors by pushing decision making downward to specialists. And hold the specialists accountable for the result.

Agile Manifesto – See http://agilemanifesto.org. (It’s ok to click on this link, the Agile Manifesto (AM) is only 4 lines of text!) More a statement of values and organizational culture rather than a manifesto, AM was developed in 2001 by 16 developers who were seeking to explain their world view as to how systems and software should be developed. From the manifesto emerged several types of Agile methods, all of which share at least one common perspective, that is, that traditional IT waterfall development and bureaucratic corporate controls are the Anti-Christ. Pair programming, SAFe, FDD, SCRUM, XP, and more. Our view is the most important concept to arise out of the AM is the notion that working software should be the measure of the success of a system. Agile is easy to do on greenfield development, and much harder on brownfield.

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