By bfwebster on Jul 9, 2010 in Art of 'Ware, Competition, Development, Main, Management, Marketing, Product development, Project Failure | 0 Comments
The KIN debacle (product canceled after five weeks; reports of actual phones sold range from 8,000 all the way down to 500), followed by Microsoft’s announcement of layoffs, has triggered on-line discussion among Microsoft employees, past and present. Even recognizing the self-selecting and inevitably self-serving nature of those comments, they still reflect serious, serious problems [...]
By bfwebster on Dec 28, 2009 in Complex systems, Main, Maintenance, Management, Project Failure, Risk management, Surviving Complexity, Uncategorized | 4 Comments
Roger Sessions has published a white paper, “The IT Complexity Crisis: Danger and Opportunity” (PDF). It’s created a bit of a stir in tech circles, largely because Sessions estimates that “worldwide, we are already losing over USD 500 billion per month on IT failure, and the problem is getting worse” (page 1; emphasis in original). [...]
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, 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 [...]