25 ways to ride a dead horse

Or in other words, 25 ways to combat the reality that a software project is dead – and continue to live in denial.

You would think that you wouldn’t need to be convinced to get off a dead or dying horse, right? Well I hate to be the one to ruin a party but you need to think again, because it’ happens all too often. People get stuck to their old ways and bad habits and become afraid to move forward, afraid to innovate and afraid to say ‘you know what, this project is dead and we can’t continue going like this and expect everything to be OK’.

We are just afraid to take ‘risks’ , and this isn’t generally a bad thing. It is bad however, if your understanding of ‘risk’ is compromised by some corporate assurance:

- “It’s worked like this for 25 years, why not continue riding this baby?”

- “Well boss, because it’s dead.”

Don’t kid yourself to believe that it’s riskier to revive or replace a dead horse than to continue riding it.

Now let’s get to the fun part.

When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.

Strategy? What do you know about strategy? Very likely nothing if you find yourself doing the following:

1. Buying a stronger whip: This equates pretty much to hiring heavy duty resources to get the job done. The truth is that it doesn’t matter how heavy duty they are – they won’t bring a dead horse back to life.
2. Changing riders: Did your team in Estonia not manage to get the job done? Maybe a team somewhere else will do a better job? Wrong. They will just do the same thing – perhaps even worse. Why? Well because at first they may not realise that the horse is dead – whereas your Estonian team had gone as far as to get a death certificate for it. They knew the score.
3. Declaring, “God told us to ride this horse.”: Just because upper management think its the right move – doesn’t make it the right move. Impose your beliefs if you strongly believe whatever you have in mind will pay off. Explain not just that the horse is dead – but why it is dead, and what problems it is going to bring about by being dead. Sometimes you may need to spell it out to them, but if the end result is a dismount – you win.
4. Appointing a committee to study the horse: A classic case of living in denial. The horse is dead, you all really know it but you probe and probe just to make sure its not revivable. This especially happens if you just ‘changed riders’. See point 2.
5. Threatening the horse with termination: Well, what can I say? Stop with the threats already and put us all out of our misery.
6. Proclaiming, “This is the way we’ve always ridden this horse.”: We just hate moving forwards don’t we? Convincing yourself everything is OK probably makes you feel better, but just wait until the horse’s flesh starts to rot and stink. Inviting many unwanted problems to your camp.
7. Develop a training session to improve our riding ability: Why not blame the riders? After all if a rider can’t ride a dead horse – he isn’t much of a rider is he? He definitely needs some training.
8. Reminding ourselves that other camps ride this same kind of horse: Does this really make it OK? What happens when that one camp decides to dismount and invest in a healthy powerful young stallion? Don’t wait for that moment – be that moment.
9. Determining that riders who don’t stay on dead horses are lazy, lack drive, and have no ambition – then replacing them: That’s right. It’s the fault of the rider, 100%.
10. Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included: Unfortunately this is going to happen anyway if somebody doesn’t dismount – or at least think about it.
11. Reclassifying the horse as “living-impaired.”: Of course. It’s just a prototype.
12. Hiring an outside consultant to advise on how to better ride the horse: We’ve  been through this before – our people are just inadequate if they can’t work with poor quality, sorry, ride on dead horses.
13. Harnessing several dead horses together to increase the speed: Slow servers? No problem – just throw more hardware at it. Make more servers!
14. Confessing boldly, “This horse is not dead, but alive!”: Ignorance is bliss.
15. Providing additional funding and/or training to increase the dead horse’s performance: OK, so we now realize it’s not the riders causing the problem. Maybe something is wrong with the horse – but it’s definitely not dead – probably just some kind of flu. It will be right in no time. Wrong again. You can’t get back the time you waste trying to fix something that’s irreparable.
16. Riding the dead horse “outside the box.”: A manager’s dream. Pushing the envelope.
17. Get the horse a Web site: Marketing the horse will surely bring back its appeal – and who knows, it may even resurrect.
18. Killing all the other horses so the dead one doesn’t stand out: If your competition didn’t already kill their own horse – this may actually work.
19. Taking a positive outlook: Pronouncing that the dead horse doesn’t have to be fed, it is less costly, carries lower overhead, and therefore contributes substantially more to the bottom line of the company’s budget than do some other horses.
20. Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses: Great. Now we have an excuse when somebody realizes that our touch screen module doesn’t work properly – it wasn’t fully documented in the requirements. Good work.
21. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position: Being optimistic about what the horse can do will cause interesting psychological effects within the camp. The horse was once just a cart for ferrying around food, but now – now it is a luxury travelling vessel.
22. Name the dead horse, “paradigm shift” and keep riding it: Damn right. We write the rules. The horse ain’t dead – you just don’t understand it.
    
23. Riding the dead horse “smarter, not harder”: No doubt this spectacular advice came from the external consultant.
24. Stating that other horses reflect compromise: Our horse is the horse, and it doesn’t matter if it performs badly – because we made it. Further to that we have an inferiority complex and thus will not consider using something else.
25. Remembering all the good times you had while riding that horse: It worked once, and it worked well. Let’s stick with it.

So before you try to revive a dying horse. Consider the alternatives. Make sure you’re not trying to justify one of the 25 ways to ride a dead horse.

I’d like to thank the following article for inspiration, albeit from a less than relavent source – it works: http://www.tonycooke.org/free_resources/stories_illustrations/25_ways.html

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