Bruce F. Webster

My newest Baseline column is up, and in it, I talk about technology lifecycles that can cause you grief: Each technology is on its own product lifecycle, which may or may not match with your organization’s business and development lifecycles. In particular, there are certain cycle mismatch patterns that commonly occur in organizations looking to [...]

I have written about the thermocline of truth, a phenomenon I have witnessed several times in large IT projects where the true status of the project (usually not good) gets blocked at a certain layer of management, slowly moving up the management chain and usually reaching the top just weeks before the scheduled release date.  [...]

I’m currently writing a series of columns for Baseline on how to deal with frozen or reduced IT budgets due to the current economic troubles. Here are the first two columns: Performing IT Project Triage Pulling the Plug on IT Project Next up: how to deal with personnel issues.  ..bruce..

My latest Baseline column  is up, and it talks about why you should read these five books now, if you haven’t already. And if you have read them, you should probably re-read them.  ..bruce..

I’ve written previously about the “Dead Sea effect“, in which your best IT engineers and managers leave over time, leaving behind an IT staff that is slowly becoming less competent and effective. Obviously, to counteract the Dead Sea effect, you want to hold onto your best IT people. My two latest Baseline columns talk about [...]