Tom John-342103 (11/7/2013)
Still, the concept of delivery good-enough (if that is what "a little bit clunky" means) is valid and correct since good-enough today is better than perfection a year from now.The trick for project managers is to determine if good-enough really is good-enough.
Pretty clearly, for something like healtcare.gov which is being made available to potentially millions of users, the quality has to be really good. On the other hand, if you are rolling out an application for a small number of very sophisticated users, they will have some tolerance for quirks and workarounds.
It's really not up to the Project manager or the Agile team to decide what constitutes "good enough". I think we've strayed way off the mark when IT internally gets to decide what "Good enough" is. This is the same failing that leads to talking about asinine concepts such as "perfect"; you're working outside of the requirements and specifications.
It's entirely OK to build something knowing that it needs to do more than what the current phase requires. That said - what is NOT okay is to go off on a tangent and build something outside of any specifications or requirements. So - you probably should build your data layer to perform well at volumes higher than where they will be day one, but you should still have a specific target performance you're aiming for, which is agreed to by the sponsor.
In a project setting, if there is any major deviation on supportability, performance, etc... these concerns should be bubbled back up to the champion and/or sponsor, along with potential costs and risks associated. They make the call on whether to implement or delay.
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?