Making IT work since 1974.
By bfwebster on Jun 16, 2008 in Main, Management, Project Failure | 21 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 [...]
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, [...]
By bfwebster on Apr 29, 2008 in Development, Hiring, Main, Management | 5 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 [...]
By bfwebster on Apr 26, 2008 in Books, Development, Hiring, Main, Management, Software engineering, Surviving Complexity | 2 Comments
[Note: I originally wrote about this concept in my first edition of The Art of 'Ware and was going to include it in version 2.0 of that book. However, my review of the most recent translations of the oldest manuscripts of Suntzu pingfa has led me to re-interpret the maxims for that section. As a [...]