Making information technology work since 1974.
By bfwebster on Jul 17, 2008 in Articles, Baseline, Development, Main, Management | 0 Comments
My latest Baseline column is up, discussing how to make a distributed software development project work. ..bruce..
By bfwebster on Jul 7, 2008 in Development, Main, Management | 2 Comments
Sorry I haven’t posted much lately; I actually have a few posts in draft status, but I’m currently in Dallas, pouring over hundreds of pages of source code listings (Z8 assembler, anyone?) and haven’t had a chance to finish up any of them. In the meantime, here’s my latest Baseline column on the challenges of [...]
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 | 18 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 [...]