Become an expert on the future. Pick the one or two most important consumer trends to your business and stay up on them. Consumer trends provide another level of insight into consumer demand that can help you make smart decisions about whom to market to and what products your business should market.

In a complex world, it is much better to have a leader who tends to be indecisive until he or she has gathered sufficient information than to have a leader who is decisive but wrong. That problem is compounded when the leader is also resolute, because she or he refuses to change direction in response to changing conditions. The absolute worst leader is one who is decisive, inaccurate, resolute, and evasive. Evasive suggests that there is a lack of ownership in the problem and an unwillingness to confront the truth. You may want to use these criteria to evaluate leaders around the world over the past 100 years. You wiil find that the most-positive results came from DARING leaders, and the most DIRE results came from hubristic leaders who made quick (but wrong) decisions and then failed to own responsibility for the outcome.

When you commence planning for a web project, a variety of things should already have been done by other people, and a variety of items should have been provided to you. Typically, most of these things haven’t happened, and the items don’t exist. If any of these items do exist, they are often outdated or of questionable usefulness. Depending on what does or does not exist, the work you have to do to plan the project can vary significantly.

Numerous strengths can be analyzed to help you classify your project and select the most applicable lifecycle. Listed below are twelve areas of possible project strength; conversely, you may consider one or more of these areas to be intrinsically weak.

Because there are such extreme differences between software projects, you will likely find that this list is not all-inclusive. Add to this list any other areas of strength (or weakness) that you think, if left out of the decision process, might cause you to select an inappropriate lifecycle. However, in the interests of remaining focused on the “most important” areas, strive to keep the length of the list to no more than fifteen.