On a project with seemongly enough resources and time, the project team is treading water deciding whether to use string parsing or regular expressions for command line interpretation. In fact this batch and online mode of operation is a potential issue as well. Meantime the users still dont see any prototypes of reports or GUI interfaces. And the operations staff who have to live with the software are up to their gills in problems some of which the software is supposed to solve.
The project manager is a temp soon to be replaced by full time manager returning from maternity leave. This project has all the markings of Standish Group CHAOS reports 40% failure rate. Worse – if the economy tanks, this project could have “bet the business” impact. Whoever said project managers have to be Ringmasters in the finest sense of the word is not far off the mark.