Anecdote: People and Projects

For som reason I had a flashback last night to when I was studying for my Masters. We had a course in project management based on RUP where the lecturer were hierd in from a consultant company specialising in RUP.

During one of the exercises I had a chance to have a discussion with the lead lecturer. The conversation was about the differences between RUP and XP (this was when XP was starting to get hot, the year after the course used XP instead of RUP). The lecturer said one thing during the conversation, and this one thing came back to me last night.

“As far as I can tell. XP bases it self a lot on having highly skilled and passionated people. Hardly any project can fail when everyone is highly competent and passionated about the project.”

The quote  might loose a bit in the translation. This post is not about XP nor RUP. But the remembrance of the statement; its not how you do it but whom you do it with.