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.
Distributed Development (Part I)
The idea of an IT project team spread out over a wide geographical area is an old one. It became practical in the late ’70s and early ’80s, with the advent of hard disk drives — instead of punched cards, paper tape or magnetic tape — for source-code file storage, wide-area networking (including the Internet), […]
The Many-Headed Beast on the Three-Legged Stool
Within a given organization — corporate or governmental — three separate groups exist that can determine the success or failure of your IT project. This is true whether you’re a senior IT project manager within that organization, a consulting firm developing or re-engineering a system for that organization or an external vendor trying to sell […]
Lies, Damned Lies, and Project Metrics (Part III)
[Here are links to Part I and Part II] In the prior two parts (links above), I covered the ideal qualities of metrics (informative and, preferably, predictive; objective; and automated), and why it’s so hard to come up with useful metrics for IT management. Let’s now talk about two concepts that may help you monitor […]
Lies, Damned Lies, and Project Metrics (Part II)
[Part I is here.] In my previous post, I talked about the use of metrics in IT project management and the three qualities of an ideal metric: informative and preferably predictive, objective, and automated. The ideal set of metrics would tell you when your IT project is going to ship; these metrics would give you […]
Lies, Damned Lies, and Project Metrics (Part I)
When Capers Jones published Assessment and Control of Software Risks (Yourdon Press, 1994), he identified the most serious software risk in IT projects as “Inaccurate Metrics,” and the second most serious software risk as “Inadequate Measurement”. I remember being startled when I first read that back in 1995—they certainly weren’t what I would have chosen—and […]