A Golden Moment is the instant in a project when large numbers of features come together for testing and must work or the project is in trouble.

"Golden Moments" sound like a good thing, but in projects, Golden Moments risk your losing control of the project. Most teams avoid building Golden Moments into plans at the outset, but end up with them by accident.

Building Incrementally...

Whether you are building a product, a system, or an infrastructure tool, the best way to manage the project is to combine pieces into small and manageable chunks. Putting together a few pieces at a time minimizes the permutations of unexpected interactions between features. It also makes the mental task of understanding the interactions more comprehendible for people working with the product.

Most contemporary project management lifecycles such as Incremental, Spiral, or Radical call for incremental building of the product as features become available.

Planning Incrementally...

My preference is to plan projects as a series of product-builds or software integrations that add features to an evolving product as they become available, with the most challenging technology added first. I then plan the development of the features to match the incremental building of the product. While resources, talent, and complexity determine the feasibility of this approach on a specific project, this is usually my initial approach.

What Goes Wrong...

The challenge of avoiding Golden Moments comes as system components or features are delayed in development. This causes the later integrations or prototype builds to have increasing numbers of critical features until a Golden Moment is born. Avoiding this is a project management challenge best served by keeping focus and deploying resources on the most challenging features in the early builds.

This problem is inherent in large tool and infrastructure projects such as CRM (customer requirements management) by virtue of size. They require a Golden Moment of implementation before there is real customer value. Half of CRM projects fail (WSJ 4/22/2) and I suspect that the illusiveness of the customer benefit Golden Moment is a major contributor. In very large projects, the Golden Moment evolves from the large amount of investment and organizational pain that has to be endured before significant benefits can be experienced. Customers demand to experience benefit incrementally instead of waiting months or years.

High Stakes...

From the standpoint of a manager looking at a portfolio of projects, I see a red flag when projects contain Golden Moments. When a project plans for or evolves into a Golden Moment near the end, I feel that is usually a sign of a project in trouble... a sign that there are likely many issues working against a timely and high quality project completion.

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