Whilst chomping through my Mac Donald’s breakfast (mmmm ?) and working my way through the Daily Mail newspaper I read an article entitled “The Best Ever…for management consultants”. The article was a rant about the fact that the NHS spent an estimated £1 billion on Management Consultants last year, and that Dr Paul Miller, leader of Britain’s hospitital doctors (Chairman of the British Medical Association Consultants Committee), mocked Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt’s recent boast that the HNS has had its best year ever.
He rightly stated “This has been the NHS’s best year ever….for management consultants…for losing staff…for wasting money,’ Dr Miller, (one of the “Great & The Good” or a “Jedi” as I like to call them), spoke out against the ‘dark-side’ of the IT Industry (the “money machine” management consultants).
Brave man!!
Dr Miller stated at the BMA’s annual consultants conference recently “that management consultants charged the public sector an estimated £3 billion in 2005”. He then went on to say “that it was hard to avoid the conclusion that we are working in a service which is being broken by policies which don’t work, devised by officials who have resigned, implemented by managers who don’t believe, on staff in disbelief and patients without a say. “Hear Hear” in my view.
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It would seem that my comments on a post listed on the blogg AGILE Advice where I expressed my views that AGILE methods seem to have moved on from a method designed to make small visual based projects fly (please see my post AGILE Enough is Enough and is now being considered as a scalable enterprise level solution is causing a bit of a “storm in a tea cup”.
Over the last few months I have seen a significant rise in consultancy requests from companies who are finding that AGILE as an enterprise level solution is massively increasing costs in many cases in exchange for lower quality delivery and often zero impact on the madness that is 70% to 92% annual UK IT project failure rates.
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This week I released a post offering for free a download of a Programme Level Access 2003 Risk /Issue tracking tool Access 2003 Risk & Issue Tracking Tool. I suggest anyone who is serious about risk and issue management needs to download this tool. However, the problem with project management tools and their ability to increase the probability of IT project /programme success rates is nicely explained by the following quote:-
“A fool with a tool is still a fool”
Link to John’s article on “tools and fools” 11/05/04 John Stelzer is Director fo Industry Development for Sterling Commerce
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Please click on the following link to download your FREE Access 2003 Programme Level Risk Issue Tracking & Logging Tool
When you download the attached file, you will notice that it is in PKZIP compressed format in order to help those few people still using narrow band. In order to get access to the application you will need to uncompress the file using PKZIP for Windows. If you do not have PKZIP installed on your PC then I suggest you get a free 30-day trial down load from PKWARE. It is easy to install and use!
The purpose of this risk /issue-tracking tool was to solve the difficulties of tracking, controlling and aggregating risks & issues across differing projects within the same programme of work. Running proper risk & issue management on large IT programmes of work often consists of weekly sorting of numerous spreadsheet-based risk & issue logs with differing data fields and formats. Amalgamating these numerous spreadsheets into two or three homogenous spreadsheets for attachment to my fortnightly Programme Progress Report was in some cases a real paper-churning knightmare.
After a belly full of this I built the attached application.
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Just read the following article from an AGILE evangelist blogg – Managing “Leaderful” Groups
This article made me really angry. It makes AGILE look like the Hippy Commune method for software development. “We can all be leaders, we are leaders we all work together for the common good etc etc” (sounds like new labour 
) and “Evil Managers as was rudely stated” have to be re-educated. Sounds like Pol Pot’s year zero. I KID YOU NOT there are Project Management training sites offering AGILE training entitled “how to project manage AGILE projects where you don’t have much to do.” CRAZIEST thing I have ever heard.
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