April 2014, Vol. 241 No. 4

Features

The Tortoise, The Hare And The Pipeline Project

Who doesn’t remember Aesop’s fable about the tortoise and the hare? The story concerns a hare who ridicules a tortoise that has challenged him to a race. The hare soon leaves the tortoise behind and, confident of winning, takes a nap midway through the course. When the hare awakes, however, he finds that his competitor has arrived at the finish line before him. This story should resonate in the current world of pipeline projects, especially for companies that believe the return on some projects is so attractive it is better to shortcut critical definition tasks to reduce a project’s overall cycle time (time from the formation of the core project team to steady-