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One of the most overlooked aspects in sports is the follow through. We tend to focus on hitting the ball, but what you do after the fact is very important.

The same is obviously true for projects, but we often tend to get to focussed on finding the ball and hitting it out of the park. What about the next pitch?

Too often projects work like this:

• Get idea
• Spec out idea
• Implement idea
• Crack open champagne the night of launch. "We made 1.0!"

The hardest work is actually post launch. Not only do we need to do maintenance, but we need to track the usage/project and make sure it is a success.

To do this correctly we need to think about this up front. The initial project plan needs to define what will make this project a success, and you need to work out the statistics that you will need to track to measure it.

The process then needs to have someone with ownership of the project to take care of the follow through. This takes time, not only for tracking, but also because chances are you will want to DO something about the information that you are tracking. This means giving the developers time to work on those tasks.

It may be fun to whip something cool together, but wouldn't it be more fun to see it truly succeed? Follow-through.