Every week we select some customers and call to see how their deployment is going.  I am sure most organizations perform this periodic success check with their customers.  In response to one such call this past week I got this reply …

Thanks for your voicemail.  I’d welcome the opportunity to catch up.  The short version is that we haven’t been able to get the tool to work effectively for us yet.  Frankly, that is mostly our fault.  We over engineered release 1.0.   

I spoke with the customer yesterday and the customer explained that despite advice to the contrary that the person on their side really wanted to bake into lots of project management – way too much in fact - he said she was like "the process police”!  It happens and it flies against everything we advise. 

I spoke to the customer and all is well – we helped with the slimming down of the project management approach.

About this time last year I wrote a post on this very topic – using the example of Michael Phelps (the Olympic swimmer) and what he can / needs to eat compared to us mere mortals.  It might be worth a quick re-read … Stop biting off more than you can chew

Also on a related topic I see a nice article this week from Geof Lory on simple lists, his daughter and project management - article on Checklists.