Your clients may not understand why you follow certain practices as a project professional. They may encourage you to take shortcuts that they believe will save time, money, and difficulty. You know better, but how can you convince them?

Entering a holding pattern on a project can give you the opportunity to gather additional information about a problem. But, sometimes, holding consumes valuable resources with disastrous consequences.

While everything should be done to avoid project failure, it does occur. When it does, management and the team must look into why a project failed, to avoid repeating mistakes in the future. Failure must be more than simply accepted or allowed. It also needs to be closely analyzed.

This article explains methods to build a team that will embrace "required work" and deliver robust software in a predictable fashion. It proposes a measure that helps calculate the throughput of an agile team by comparing work committed to work actually done.