So, Tolstoy tells us that all happy families are all the same, whereas each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. I think that the same applies to development projects: all successful projects are the same, unsuccessful ones fail in their own ways.
This occurred to me while chatting with one of my Swiss colleagues recently. The Swiss end of the business does a lot of successful RUP engagements: that's right,
successful RUP. The reason that they are successful is twofold. Firstly, they always do a development case so they always carefully pick and choose which roles, disciple and the rest they will or will not use on a project. Secondly, they understand that RUP projects really are supposed to be really iterative and really incremental, that almost all the disciplines go on to a greater or lesser extent in all phases. A (different) Swiss colleague once asked me what the difference was between Agile and RUP. My only semi-flippant answer was that if you do RUP the way Philippe Kruchten wants you to do it, then not much.
