Making information technology work since 1974.
By bfwebster on Jun 19, 2008 in Articles, Baseline, Management, Metrics, Surviving Complexity | 0 Comments
My newest Baseline column is up: “Lies, Damned Lies, and Project Metrics (part 3)“. In it, I wrap up my discussion on IT project metrics, outlining a possible approach using instrumentation and heuristics. Go check it out. ..bruce..
By bfwebster on Jun 16, 2008 in Main, Management, Project Failure | 17 Comments
The following document is the actual text — carefully redacted — of a memo I wrote some time back [i.e., several years ago] after performing an IT project review; names and identifying concepts have been changed to preserve confidentiality (and protect the guilty). The project in question was a major IT re-engineering effort for a [...]
By bfwebster on May 14, 2008 in Development, Main, Management, Project Failure, Software engineering, Surviving Complexity | 0 Comments
[Copyright 2008 by Bruce F. Webster. All rights reserved. Adapted from Surviving Complexity (forthcoming).]
Humanity has been developing information technology for half a century. That experience has taught us this unpleasant truth: virtually every information technology project above a certain size or complexity is significantly late and over budget or fails altogether; those that don’t fail [...]
By bfwebster on May 5, 2008 in Books, Hiring, Main, Management, Surviving Complexity | 3 Comments
In my post on the “Dead Sea Effect“, I talk about why the overall quality of personnel in large corporate and government IT shops declines over time (short answer: the great IT engineers leave for greener pastures, the not-so-great ones stay and entrench).
So, why would IT engineers leave one of the most highly regarded, high-quality, [...]
By bfwebster on Apr 29, 2008 in Development, Hiring, Main, Management | 3 Comments
[UPDATE: Here are some more observations from Ruby-coloured glasses.]
Alex Papadimoulis over at The Daily WTF (one of my favorite IT blogs) has posted a lengthy and thoughtful solution to the problems I raised in my post on the “Dead Sea effect“. Specifically, he refers to the “Up or Out” model, pioneered over a century ago [...]