The Rights of Everyone

Everyone involved with a DAD project, including stakeholders and people in secondary roles, has a collection of rights. These rights help to provide a philosophical foundation for both how people interact with one another and how to effectively govern DAD projects. The rights of everyone are the following:

• To be treated with respect.

• To have decisions made in a timely manner.

• To produce and receive quality work at all times based on agreed to project standards and principles.

• To estimate the activities you are actively involved with, and to have those estimates respected by others. These estimates should be as aggressive as possible yet still achievable.

• To be provided adequate resources, including but not limited to time and money, to do the job that’s been asked of you.

• To have commitments made to you honored, and in the case where this is not possible to have alternatives negotiated with you in a timely manner.

• To determine how your resources will be invested. For the people funding the project this is how the funds will be spent, and for the people working on the project (and thereby investing their time), this is what tasks they choose to work on.

• To be given the opportunity to gain the knowledge and skills pertinent to making the project a success. For example, businesspeople will likely need to learn about the underlying technologies/techniques, and technical staff will likely need to learn about the business.

• To work in a “safe environment” where people have the opportunity to make mistakes, and better yet to have those mistakes recognized as valuable learning opportunities.

• To be commended, nurtured, and supported.

• To be provided good-faith information in a timely manner. Sometimes this is just the “best guess” at the time, and that’s perfectly all right. This includes but is not limited to business information such as prioritized requirements and detailed domain concepts as well as technical information such as designs and detailed technical concepts.

• To own your organization’s software processes, following and actively improving these processes when needed.