Rescuing a BizTalk Project – What are the common problems

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I've been reflecting on some of the occasions over the years where I have had to step into projects and get them back on track. I've had these kind of situations in different fashions such as a customer I work with has asked me to move to another project because they were having problems or a new client who has contacted me specifically because they have ran into difficulties on their project and need some help.

I tend to find that these kind of projects fall into two types. The first is where the team cant see the wood for the trees and have got so deep into their problems that they just need an independent person to come in with a fresh view and ask some common sense questions or some special technical expertise which the team doesn't have. The second type tends to be where the project has stalled and is not making progress and things get very political, in these cases the project tends to need someone to come in and to challenge the way things have been done and make some changes to the working practices so things can be more successful.

I've been thinking about some of the situations where I have engaged on these type of projects and what some of the common symptoms are. Below is a list of the most common ones I have come across and I'm wondering what other people tend to find.

• Performance Issues
  • Poor infrastructure setup
  • Poor design
  • No performance testing

     

• Poor quality
  • Lack of ALM process
  • Poor developer testing
  • Lack of continuous integration
  • Inexperienced team
  • Poor design
  • Lack of reviews of design
  • Lack of standards and governance

     

• Failure to make progress against timelines
  • Poor requirements
  • Poor control around changing requirements
  • Poor analysis of change
  • Inexperienced resources
  • Over complicating things
  • Poor work management
  • Problems working with vendors
  • Problems working with internal teams
  • Teams playing defect tennis
  • Poor problem resolution techniques

     

• Supportability Challenges
  • Lack of monitoring and tracking in the solution
  • Lack of experience and training for the people supporting the solution
  • Poor hand over documentation

     

• Infrastructure Issues
  • BizTalk is new to the infrastructure team
  • Lack of ownership of BizTalk within the infrastructure team
  • BizTalk backup and disaster recovery