– Don’t specify any measures of effectiveness or process control points at all. With no standards by which to judge an effort, or concrete changes in reality, supervisors will pull your funding out of frustration and lack of comprehension.
– Take one step forward and then one step back, never making any progress regardless of the metric.
– Change the metrics or their interpretation. By moving the goal posts, you can convince your management that you don’t know your own plan or its benefits.
– Have any plan that takes longer to produce undeniable results than the applicable budgetary cycle under which it is funded. Your otherwise successful effort will be abandoned because you missed the cutoff threshold that weeds out waste, fraud, and abuse.
– Take longer than 4 years to produce physically demonstrated results. The longer you take in an effort, even one with clear intermediate measures of performance, the more it becomes functionally indistinguishable from waste, fraud, and abuse. If people are ever to be capable of rejecting money pits and rock-busting, they have to cut you off when the effort duration grows to this magnitude. Not only that, but at 4+ years, your original sponsors and champions will be moving on to their next positions, which means you will face even harsher evaluation in the next phase of the effort.
– Don’t report on the metrics clearly, or hide them in a thicket of documentation, which prevents people from fully recognizing the merit of your effort.
– Don’t have an explanation of the entire process. This one isn’t too bad, except when the situation significantly changes and external factors affect you. If that’s the case, then people will ask what else you don’t understand, and why you are actually going to succeed, if these other factors are coming in and eliminating your progress.