This is my favorite part:<p><i>If a project offered a value of 10 times its estimated cost, no one would care if the actual cost to get it done were double the estimate. On the other hand, if expected value were only 10 percent greater than expected cost, lateness would be a disaster. Yes it would be a disaster, but instead of obsessing over “What’s the matter with those software folks who didn’t deliver on the schedule we gave them?” we need to ask instead “Why did we ever kick off a project with such marginal expected value?”</i><p>The message for us software developers is: try to work only on what I call <i>strategic</i> projects: projects whose expected value is much greater than their cost could possibly be.  That means they need to continue to pay benefits well into the future.