Bruce F. Webster

Obviously, I’ve been slow in posting here, since I’ve had two new columns go up at Baseline since I last posted. The first column, “Second Class Software Quality for Major IT Projects”, talks about the curious fact that organizations are willing to spend millions, tens of millions, even hundred of millions of dollars on major [...]

My newest Baseline column is up, talking about the dilemma faced in deciding whether to acquire software or build it yourself: The other day, an IT colleague of mine mentioned a conflict at a corporation where he’s working. The corporation has a mission-critical application deployed across a large number of workstations. The set of corporate [...]

My latest Baseline column is now up: Last week, I talked about some of the reasons why large organizations often reject the best solutions for a troubled IT project: fear, pride, budget, and the ever-present internal politics. This week, as promised, I will talk about what it takes to champion the right solution. I can’t [...]

I have a new Baseline column up on the tendency of large organizations to reject the best solutions for a troubled IT project: The consultants, usually with the help of the employees in the trenches, would use their time, effort, and expertise to analyze the system under development or in production. They would arrive at [...]

My latest Baseline column talks about the risks that follow a successful IT project: But sometimes with projects that really shouldn’t succeed—that are attempting too much, too fast, with too many risks—enough things go right, particularly along the critical paths, enough superhuman effort is made by those involved, so that the project does indeed go [...]