Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

The later in a project you correct a mistake, the more it costs. Confirmed again.

There are many wise sayings associated with managing and working  projects. Many of the wise sayings are myths that have been busted. Many, however, are true, and we stubbornly refuse to believe them. Our stubbornness is evidenced by repeatedly ignoring them and hurting ourselves. One of these old wise saying that is true is:

The later in a project you correct a mistake, the more it costs.

A current project I work has a lot of MS Word documents. Word documents are fine alone. When you try to combine them into one document, you can have all sorts of problems with paragraph styles, Tables of Contents, and such. The persons on the project didn’t address these concepts early as they would be taken care of later. Well, later is here, and yes, there will be dozens of person hours spent correcting mistakes that were made early in the project. Too bad they weren’t corrected early in the project when the fixes were simple.

Wise old saying confirmed (again).