Go or nogo?

Whenever people make decisions on whether to go ahead with a project, they think if it makes business sense. Of course they do. What happens much more rarely is people thinking about how much sense it makes in terms of other architecture layers. The organizational architecture gets some attention but below that, it's all forgotten.

However, most of project/product failures come from the new stuff not fitting with the existing things in terms of functional, technical or support architecture. Of course, discrepancies there will mean changes to the original plan and can ultimately translated into dollars that end up in the business case, but wouldn't it be much cheaper to consider this in the beginning rather than all the way through the project?

This issue is also tied to the "10-minute-crap" problem: whenever people come up with an idea that is really easy to implement and makes some business sense they go "well, it does not bring massive business benefits but it's easy to do so let's just build it". Wrong. Because this is how you end up distorting all underlaying layers. Why would one do something stupid just because it takes very little effort?

To recap: go/no go decisions should be made by considering all the aspects of the project, not just the business top line.