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The "Death March" Project
Are you managing the project from hell?
12/1/98

by Sara Fleming

It's a scenario familiar to many people: a gray-suited VP or account rep shows up in your office one day with the project from hell. Develop a Web product with a list of features and functions as long as your arm, and do it in half the time, with a too-small staff and an insufficient budget. Welcome to the death march project.

Software consultant Edward Yourdon coined the phrase "death march project" to describe a development project whose "likelihood of failure is >50 percent,"^[1] based on risk-assessment methods standard in project management. It's true that assessing project risk is a lot like herding cats. Problems can develop on any project at any time. Unanticipated market events can put the project at risk. Or your key programmer goes out on maternity leave. The client declares bankruptcy. Anything can happen — but on a well-planned project, the risks are anticipated and minimized. Death march projects, on the other hand, have trouble built in from the very beginning. The project is built on limitations; problems are part of its foundation. On the death march project, survival may qualify as success.

So why get involved? In some cases you may be fortunate enough to see the project coming from a mile away and, better still, you may be in a position to decline to take part. On the other hand, the project may be critical to the success of the company — or your employment there. The death march project may be motivated by seemingly sound business logic: get a product to market before the competition, acquire a major new client, break new technological ground. Or maybe the CEO had an epiphany while stuck in traffic in his new Volvo S-80. Either way, the project's a done deal, and you're stuck on it.

Now what?

^[1] Edward Yourdon, Death March: The Complete Software Developer's Guide to Surviving 'Mission Impossible' Projects, Prentice Hall, 1997, p. 4. See the PMI's Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge for more on risk assessment. Available on the PMI Web site.

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