The Exceeding Banality of Burning Projects
![Image](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgd9mHXzHfTZMOndmxOLEeUSo9tlprzHVFjD2zQj8GkduI9n91N_BdUEHC7CqXFhFWZtLOzbP8mbUFJstpwd9Wg3lhp_zqBitXea6Y7_eKbmHRnw--GMVreN8QuXQs16uv5TLQdPmZQJIQz5CfWvyq7NUyTyYiBZ1ek-CYcqHEQtRvWYRMmbYJE2RY4/s320/pmbicycleonfire.png)
Listening to a podcast recently I heard a project manager say of himself that he is often given the project that are "already on fire." I cringed, because I have made that comment myself quite a few times. Too often it was in interviews that I made the boast. It's not really that remarkable for a project manager to be handed a project on fire and asked to make something of it. There are many reasons for a project to be "going south," and it's going to show time, cost, scope, and possibly, ultimately, quality. One such project for me was a cloud migration. A major data center was being shut down and all the services hosted there had to be migrated to the cloud. When I got involved it was already badly behind schedule, and extra cost had been incurred in renewing the lease on a data center's space while also paying for cloud services. What had happened was a project manager had laid out a very solid plan for doing the migration in waves. It was going to i