And no, hiring more programmers was not a solution. No one will ever be served by agreeing to unrealistic promises, and the party hurt the most will be the customer who's doing the asking. This lesson I have saved for last, because it is the most important. This is the key to process improvement. How you document will vary from organization to organization, even vary from project to project within a single organization.
Documentation is the bridge between individual and organizational knowledge.
Soldier on carefully The best practices listed above are only a representative handful for the nearly two dozen we identified in the first six months of the project. But our work wasn't over once we had identified and documented some key best practices. At this point, we had a framework to look for the missing pieces, the areas where we needed to concentrate next. Management had a vague idea of a product, but a firm idea of a deadline. Despite the vagueness, management sold anything and everything and hoped that it could somehow be miraculously developed.