I've used this same approach repeatedly myself. It is particularly effective in turnaround situations, of which I've managed several. I have gotten into the habit of actively looking for these kinds of opportunities. I like to have a list of possible mini-projects with this kind of value, then I can "seed" my project list with these. Programmers like them because you can see the end product fairly quickly and they produce real value for the customers in ways non-techies can easily understand. And often, it's much easier to quantify the cost/benefit equation of these types of projects because of their tight scope. And because of the small size, the risk is generally small. We have to do the big projects, the transforming ones, but the 30 day blitz project is an important tactical tool to get things going and build credibility.

Thomas M. MacKay

I can't agree more with your thoughts. More and more people are realizing that Agility is key to project successes. The speed at which business changes means that a two year project that delivers exactly what it signed up for will be out of date by the time it is delivered. A key to success is carving out small deliverables that will actually provide benefit to the business quickly. Delivering the highest priority items quickly so the business can immediately begin to use them.

I hihgly recommend you read "Agile Estimation and Planning" by Mike Cohn or any of the Scrum books by Ken Schwaber for more details how and why this works.

In a nutshell, delivering quickly leads to immediate return on investment. Also delivering the highest priority items means you get the most value by what is delivered early. The old 80/20 rule.

Excellent idea, for the reasons mentioned and for another:

Projects can assume such broad scopes that they're often looked at in terms of "all or nothing", or "pass/fail".

Whenever possible, I like to see project design and implementation segmented such that the project is delivered in plateaus. Your example of a 30 day deliverable would be the first plateau in such a scheme.

When it's possible to deliver results this way (and of course, it's not always possible, but I think it's a strategy too-seldom used), it's also possible to ensure that, no matter what happens in later stages, usable value remains behind.

Right on the money. What counts is delivering results fast. Our business users have seen and heard it all before; only rapid results will ensure credibility for the rest of the journey.

The only qualifiers I would add is firstly it needn't be 30 days. 30-90 days is perfectly acceptable, especially when that is what is announced and the deadline is met. And secondly, anything you deliver in this timeframe won't be an end in itself, but only the first phase of a series of new releases, each one building on the other.

Because it was possible for a firm’s traders to do thousands of trades very quickly, the firms felt the need to get better intra-day trading data so they could better track the risks their traders were taking. My client decided to invest in a multi-million dollar state-of-the-art system to provide this trading data in a streaming real-time environment.

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