Microsoft Eats the Dog Food
by Volker Weber
We live in a project world, where project managers and project teams work together to deliver results on time, on budget, on spec, and on the money. Except for one project team that uses all kinds of mistakes, questions, quandaries, and what-ifs to make everyone else's projects run more smoothly: the project team that's creating the next version of Microsoft Project, the software first released in 1990 that's designed to make it easier to live in project world.
Project's general manager, Chris Capossela, says that he uses his own project's thorniest problems, and their solutions, to run better projects everywhere. "We use the old version of Project as we're building the new one," Capossela says. "At Microsoft, we call that 'eating your own dog food,' because it forces us to see what's wrong with our own projects and what's wrong with the software." In fact, in the course of upgrading Project, the project team came across a number of important lessons and improvements that can make any project more likely to succeed.
