• Is there Method in your madness? Whether you are extreme, agile, lean or totally RAD everyone has some way of keeping the chaos and anarchy at bay.
  
  
• Requirements are the flip side of scope creep. How do you deal with the customers who'll know what they want when they sees it!? Or the one who wants everything. Today!

The Tyranny of On-time and On-budget IT project management grew out of construction project management and large-scale engineering design projects: large, complex undertakings with lots of moving parts and lots of dependencies. Conventional wisdom claims that something like 50-70% of all IT projects fail. Other than as a way to either beat up on IT management or to sell project management services by systems integrators, is there any important insight buried in this data? Increasingly, I think not. (Feb. 2005 Enterprise Systems)

Big Bang, Large Crater Big bang installations utilize the big red switch methodology, where a transition just requires throwing a big red switch, and then a miracle happens. Miracles seldom happen in the software industry, and going for a big bang often leaves you with nothing more than a large crater. (Jan. 2005 StickyMinds)

Opening the book on ITIL About 20 years ago the British Government created the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), a set of seven best-practice IT management books. It has been big in England and the Netherlands for the past 10 years, and is spreading in America and Australia. (May 2004 Sydney Morning Herald)

Open-source development models fall flat One of the drawbacks to the free and open source software development model is that mainstream users often get left behind because the really technical people creating the software design functionality for themselves, not for the average user. Because developers are its users, they create the functions they specifically need. Also it takes companies more than twice as long to develop software in disparate locations than in one location. (May 2004 ComputerWeekly)

How Culture Clashes Create Project Failures Those of us who have been in the IT industry for while are familiar with a pattern of behaviour that frequently sends high risk, large-scale projects to destruction. The sequence of events is so familiar that the IT industry has a well-established series of cartoons involving trees and swings to illustrate each stage. (Apr. 2004 IT-Analysis)

Project Success Rates Improved Over 10 Years Project success rates have increased to 34% of all projects. That’s more than a 100% improvement from the success rate found in the first study in 1994. Most of the challenged projects in this year’s survey had a cost overrun of under 20 percent of the budget, a threefold improvement over the first 1994 study. (Jan. 2004 SoftwareMag)

Trading Gold for Days An iron triangle dominates software development – budget, schedule, quality. One way to trade gold for days is to use additional monetary resources to move your team into a new work environment. Providing workers with a quiet, distraction-free environment can dramatically improve worker productivity. Microsoft gives each of its developers an office with a door for this reason. (Dec. 2003 StickyMinds)

What is ITIL? ITIL provides businesses with a customizable framework of best practices to achieve quality service and overcome difficulties associated with the growth of IT systems. ITIL is to service support and delivery as PMBOK is to Project Management or ISO is to processes and procedures. In addition to texts, ITIL services and products include training, qualifications, software tools, and user groups. (Nov. 2003 Brainbox)

Optimizing the organization I don't want to know the larger context. Just tell me what the program has to do, and I'll write the code that does it. It's an awful way to approach the job of programming, and in particular it's an awful way to approach a career in programming, assuming you don't want to see your job moved offshore. (Oct. 2003 IS Survivor)

Predicting Iterative Projects We need to make sure that our customers understand the difference between product lifecycle models and development lifecycle models. To use a manufacturing analogy, when PCs come off the assembly line they're supposed to go to customers, not back to engineering. Development lifecycles, on the other hand, are inherently iterative. (Oct. 2003 StickyMinds)

Real Guidelines for Improving the Maturity Process As I listen to stories that practitioners in my classes tell about their organizations, I have experienced human behaviors associated with these levels: Infant: At this maturity level, people easily become hysterical. They shout how angry they are, bang on tables, and throw tantrums. Examples include: "What do you mean you found bugs in the system?!? You testers are always in the way of progress". (Oct. 2003 StickyMinds)

The project management umwelt Pessimists, we're told, look at a glass containing 50% air and 50% water and see it as half empty. Optimists, in contrast, see it as half full. Engineers, of course, understand the glass is twice as big as it needs to be. Which explains a major source of friction in IT-related projects: Different umwelts. (Sep. 2003 IS Survivor)

When Should You Start Project Overtime? Most of the technical people I’ve seen who try to work more than two weeks of overtime make huge numbers of mistakes, mistakes they don’t realize they’re making until long after they’ve fixed the problems. I find that I can maintain about two weeks of overtime before I’m too tired to put in a full day’s worth of work. (Jul. 2003 StickyMinds)

Software Engineering and the Art of Design Those who want to reduce software engineering (by which I mean the designing and producing of high-quality software systems) to a set of rules and procedures that can be followed by anyone to get consistently good results simply don't understand the field. (Jul. 2003 Artima)

Study: Many Major IT Projects Still Fail Even though IT leaders have greatly improved the level of strategic value they add to a company, three out of every 10 major IT projects still fail. Those surveyed put the blame on limited access to executive decision makers, the organizational structure and not having a fully integrated technology and information architecture. (Jun. 203 Datamation)

Tarnished Image: The State of IT Credibility Average-performing companies reported an IT project completion rate of 67% in 2002, down from 72% in 1999. Many IT leaders acknowledge that there's a credibility problem in IT. The most successful IT managers say there is just no substitute for quality work delivered on time and on budget. (May 2003 ComputerWorld)

Ten Ways to Guarantee Project Failure Imagine that you’ve been put in charge of a mighty important project. Imagine further that you’re allergic to success and will do anything to avoid it. What can you do to ensure that the project doesn’t just fail, but (just to be safe) fails miserably? Here are ten suggestions. (Apr. 2003 StickyMinds)

Blind Faith Why do companies often find it so hard to kill bad projects? Typically, true believers accuse dissenters of a lack of competence. So after a while, dissenters stop voicing their opinion. (Feb. 2003 ComputerWorld)

The Change-Management Challenge Building often means attempting to make change-management and version-control tools interoperate between modern application servers and bell-bottom-era mainframe environments. The most common method of integrating legacy applications and new code is putting application-server middleware and Web interfaces on host applications. (Jan. 2003 Software Development Times)

Software Project Failure: The Reasons, The Costs Schedule slips, buggy releases and missing features can mean the end of the project or even financial ruin for a company. If the cost of change becomes exponential, high cost makes adding features impractical and development must stop. Unfortunately, most companies do not realize this point exists and spend huge sums on dead products. (Jan. 2003 Datamation)

Stealth PM: How to craft a successful launch, quietly The art of stealth project management requires tailoring your approach to PM to avoid triggering bureaucratic warning bells. You must have a good understanding of the current company culture. (Dec. 2002 Builder.com)

Failing IT projects on the increase The number of failed and ill-defined IT projects is continuing to grow. Good IT disciplines for managing technology honed during the mainframe era have been lost with the advent of distributed systems. (Jul. 2002 vnunet)

IT Politics It doesn't cost a lot of money or time to consider the people factor in an implementation process, and the payoffs can be enormous: reduced turnover, increased productivity, improved morale, optimized technology and a culture that is able to manage change positively. Without a collaborative perspective, IT may find disgruntled employees standing in the way of a project's success. (Feb. 2002 CIO)

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