Making IT work since 1974.
By bfwebster on Oct 18, 2008 in Articles, Baseline, Main, Management, Project Failure, Risk management | 0 Comments
First, my apologies for the slow posting here and at BFWA.com over the past few months. It’s pretty bad when my last two posts have each covered my last two Baseline columns. But I’ve got some new material to start posting here as well, and will do so. In the meantime, I have two new [...]
By bfwebster on Sep 24, 2008 in Articles, Baseline, Development, Management, Project Failure, Quality assurance, Surviving Complexity | 0 Comments
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 [...]
By bfwebster on Aug 26, 2008 in Main, Management, Quality assurance, Software engineering | 1 Comment
On September 2nd, I’ll be speaking at a meeting of the Denver IEEE Reliability Society. It will be held at 5:30 pm in the Seagate Building in Longmont (CO), on Nelson Road between 75th Rd and Airport Rd. Here’s my abstract of the talk: INSIDE-OUT: Organizations too often treat software reliability as an ‘after the [...]
By bfwebster on Aug 26, 2008 in Main, Management, Project Failure | 1 Comment
Rand Simberg at Transterrestrial Musings (an outstanding blog, BTW) points to this e-mail from someone leaving NASA due to a litany of frustrations. I may parse out more of the e-mail later to note some of the classic troubled/failing project attributes, but this passage caught my eye: Then between us workers and the highest levels [...]
By bfwebster on Aug 15, 2008 in Articles, Baseline, Main, Management, Project Failure, Surviving Complexity | 1 Comment
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 [...]