• Steve Jobs faked full signal strength and swapped devices during the first iPhone demo due to fragile prototypes and bug-riddled software.
• Engineers got drunk during the presentation to calm their nerves.
• Despite the challenges, Jobs successfully completed the 90-minute demonstration without any noticeable issues.
Had this on Friday.
- Boss: Have we hit the milestone?
- Me: No, our performance is low and we don’t know why? We need to analyse it.
- Boss: …but we’ve done what we said we’d do. We shouldn’t beat ourselves up over some metric. I think we’ve should say we’ve made it.
Net result is that we’ve pushed a major problem into the next phase without giving ourselves more time to do anything about it. …and people wonder why projects are “late” at the last moment.
“The Mythical Man-Month” is a book written in the 70s based on experiences from software development in the 60s, and project managers still cling to the myths about project planning it debunked conclusively.
This is a success because we said so.