Management
Active risk management: doing IT projects right
In a prior post, I talked about IT project risk management and gave a real-world example of doing it wrong, with the expected consequences. But some organizations do it right, and it’s worth looking at those examples as well. Some years back, I spent a few months at a client site reviewing a couple of […]
Active risk management: doing IT projects wrong
IT projects are typically full of risks. There can be many human factors, many external factors, and many unknown factors, all of which can interact in unexpected ways. Because of that, it is critical that you actively identify, track and manage those risks. But to do that means that you have to be willing to […]
Do not defer the difficult in IT projects
When an IT project starts, those involved — both managers and developers — want to feel that they’re making progress. They also want to demonstrate that progress to those above them in the organization. So there is a very natural, very human tendency to concentrate on the easiest tasks, the “low-hanging fruit” that can be […]
Getting technology lifecycles in sync
Different technologies age at different rates. Understanding the variations is the first step to managing them. One of the great challenges you face as an IT manager is selecting the right technology for a given project, for a specific department, or for your organization as a whole. That technology may be anything from an end-user […]
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 […]