FAILING YOUR WAY TO SUCCESS

How good is “good enough”? For a lot of project managers, the answer is to reject the question: “‘Good enough’ isn’t!” By rejecting the very concept of “good enough,” they strive to take projects to a higher order of excellence, to bring the ideas of quality front and center into the discipline of project management, and to motivate people to achieve their absolute best. These are noble goals, and we salute them.

But the question still lurks in the bosom of the project, and it demands an answer. How good is “good enough”? In this project, three lives are riding on a performance outcome, and the clock is ticking. If perfect performance takes too long, can we afford it? What level of performance will be satisfactory as long as we can achieve it by our deadline?

This doesn’t imply that we intend to squeeze by with minimum performance—not at all. We plan to do our absolute best. But every golfer wants to know what par is, even if he happens to be Tiger Woods.