The third category of mistakes that I want to
mention is product-related mistakes. A
typical example of product-related mistake
is gold plating of requirements. And what that means is
basically is that it's very common for projects to have
more requirements than they actually need. For example, marketing might
want to add more features than the ones that are
actually needed by the users. And of course having more
requirements lengthens the project's schedule in a totally unnecessary way.
Feature creep is another common mistake and consists in
adding more and more features to a product that were
not initially planned and are not really needed in most
cases. And here there is evidence that the average project
experiences about a 25% growth in the number of
features over its lifetime which can clearly highly effect The
project schedule. Finally, if you're working on a project that
strains the limits of computer science. For example, because you
need to develop new algorithms for the project, or you have
to use new techniques. Then that project might be more research than
actual development. And therefore, it
should be managed accordingly. For example,
by taking into account that you will have a highly unpredictable schedule.