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Pushing for the right IT project solution
In my last post, I talked about some of the reasons why large organizations often reject the best solutions for a troubled IT project: fear, pride, budget, and the ever-present internal politics. This week, as promised, I will talk about what it takes to champion the right solution. I can’t guarantee that you’ll succeed, but […]
Resistance to the right IT project solution
Over lunch some years back, Barry Glasco (a colleague) and I were reminiscing about corporate IT projects that we’d worked on as consultants over the years. Typically, these were large systems that were either having trouble being completed or were having serious problems once they were in production. Barry pointed out a self-defeating pitfall or […]
Fooled by success: the dangers of delivering projects on time
One of my favorite books is Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicolas Taleb. Taleb’s thesis, which he explains and defends well, is that we often attribute to talent and insight great results that were actually more a matter of luck—a fortunate random outcome that might well have turned out otherwise. Taleb’s examples are largely taken from […]
Controlling IT Costs: Using a Maintenance Architect
Software rots over time. Of course, it doesn’t literally decompose, but it often becomes fragile, harder to support and more likely to break when something else in the enterprise’s IT environment changes—another application, the hosting platform and operating system, a third-party product with which it communicates, a database schema. When a defect is fixed, or […]
Distributed Development (Part II)
In Part I, I talked about all the challenges that surface when you attempt distributed software development, that is, having an IT project team being spread out over a wide geographical area. Simply put, it’s tough to do well, if at all, for a variety of reasons, including problems with communications among developers, maintaining conceptual […]