Author Archive: bfwebster
Webster is Principal and Founder at at Bruce F. Webster & Associates, as well as an Adjunct Professor for the BYU Computer Science Department. He works with organizations to help them with troubled or failed information technology (IT) projects. He has also worked in several dozen legal cases as a consultant and as a testifying expert, both in the United States and Japan. He can be reached at 303.502.4141 or at bwebster@bfwa.com.
Link to post: how Nokia missed the smartphone boat
Again, via John Gruber at Daring Fireball, comes this story from a Norwegian journalist who wrote a letter of complaint to Nokia in 2008 about his new Nokia smartphone. An excerpt from his letter: Telephones – like all other devices – need to be designed on the terms of the simplest user. All of the […]
Remember Conway’s Law
Some years ago, I was called in to lead a team of three other people in reviewing a major project at a Fortune 50 corporation. This project, which I’ll call QUBE, was a major end-to-end re-engineering of that firm’s mission-critical systems, intended to replace all the existing legacy systems. The QUBE project was supposed to […]
IT retrenchment: performing IT project triage
The on-going economic turmoil in the U.S. and global economies over the past several years continues to force many organizations to freeze, trim or even dramatically slash internal budgets. If you’re an experienced IT manager, you already know that your budget may be among the first to be affected. And that means making hard choices, […]
Link to post: Why Apple’s 64-bit CPU in the iPhone 5S matters
Via the always informative Daring Fireball comes a link to this post by Mike Ash explaining the performance implications of Apple’s new 64-bit A7 CPU in its iPhone 5S (and, I sincerely hope, in its next generation iPads, since my battered iPad 2 is due to be replaced soon). One major key is the set […]
The 5 books every IT manager should read right now
In a prior post I talked about setting up a reading program for your IT department. However, whether or not you can get your IT engineers to read, you yourself need to be aware of the fundamental realities of IT project management and software engineer that have been discovered again and again. In other words, […]