Prototyping Perils

Theo Nicolaou argues that poor communication is at fault for the majority of failed digital projects.

When you see or hear the word ‘prototype’, what comes to your mind? Perhaps a scale model made from low-cost material? Or maybe something that can be physically interacted with? Either way, in many industries, prototypes are not the finished article – nor are they expected to be. In the web industry, prototypes are a huge part of our lives. They are incredibly useful and informative, but I fear that they are often misused and misunderstood. And this leads to “the perils of prototyping”. Consider each of the following scenarios:

Scenario 1: A project team is asked to investigate the feasibility of an idea for a new digital product. The developer uses a framework (or many) without justification or research, they take little care when coding and there are no code reviews or best practices. It is all hosted on a computer that is in no way near a mirror of a production environment. The developers declare it “pretty much ready” and equally the project manager sees it as “done”. Stakeholders are led to believe it is ready, and sign it off to be launched immediately. It either goes straight into production with a huge amount of technical debt or takes much longer to launch than expected.