It occurred to me that a basic effor/time saving principle of agile project management is that you don’t try to plan everything up front, because you don’t need to!
The fact that for example getting a site live ready by a certain date requires a change to the URL pointing means you only need to worry about it when you get close to the event, as each event is connected in reality to another (‘one thing leads to another’ to slice the folk wisdom). Call it ‘managing complexity’ if you like.
AIG’s complexity blamed for fall: “The complexity and international spread of AIG’s operations impeded regulatory oversight of the derivatives unit that helped bring down the insurer, according to former executives, analysts and regulators.” (FT report)
Hmm, complexity? Maybe they should have invested in a product such as Datawatch’s Monarch software which is designed to transform report output files and other data sources into live data on your PC. Currently it is used by around 500,000 professionals worldwide and now on its 9th version.