Project Failure
Active risk management in IT projects
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 […]
Two new columns up at Baseline
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 […]
The thermocline of truth — at NASA
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 […]
They’d rather be wrong: rejecting project solutions
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 […]
Anatomy of a runaway IT project
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 […]