I mentioned in my last Agile related post - Agile Scrum Fails to Get to Grips with Human Psychology that I now want to move away from Agile focused posts for a while to give a little more balance to my blog content. However, as Al Pacino said in the God Father episode III “As soon as I am out, I find myself being pulled back in”. The “pulling back in” in this case took the form of an email from a friend.
The email stated that they had been keeping a close eye on my blog and its Agile related content, and informed me that they had never come across such seemingly organised /persistent/ aggressive and vitriolic commenting concerning what is essentially a set of commercially inspired ideas and concepts. The email continued stating that as serious blog reader he had done some investigation work and discovered that many of the blog commenters appearing on many of my Agile posts seemed to be commenting on Agile posts all over the net. When the dates and times of their comments are closely analysed it would appear that these defenders /promoters of the Agile faith are doing so possibly as a full time occupation which got me thinking!
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Project Sponsors ask yourself this question – ‘would you rather identify that a project cannot be delivered within the timescales you would like before you have spent £thousands of your budget, or after you have spent all your organisation’s cash and just a month before expected delivery? Bit of a no-brainer eh?
Then why oh why do we in IT repeatedly find ourselves having to work towards what we know is an unachievable deadline and certain project failure?
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I recently carried out some searches via Google to see if I could find a high grade downloadable IT Project Status Report template. To my dismay all I could find were mostly one-page Word documents with a few headings, poor formats and little if any useful content. Many seemed a far cry from what I would call a ‘best practice’ template, capable of informing and impressing stakeholders.
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Posted by Kevin Brady on Mon 23rd October 2006 at 09:00 AM, Filed in Industry News
This morning I read two articles “create alliances to drive change, IT directors told” Computerweekly 13/05/06 by Will Hadfield and John Riley & “Career Opportunities” by Sally Flood 15/06/06 Computing Magazine. Both these articles had positive points to make about what should be the future role of CTO’s and IT directors.
The key point mentioned in both articles is that it is vital, if companies and government departments want the following:-
• Value for money IT services
• Improvements in IT development productivity
• Systems which match original business requirements
then the recipe for success starts at the top !
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Click here to download a FREE EXAMPLE CONSULTANTS SERVICE CONTRACT
A regular visitor to this site asked me for some help in obtaining an example of a good consultant’s Service Contract, which he could use to close a direct deal with a potential client.
So, here is a copy of the kind of personal service contract I use with UK clients and under UK legal jurisdiction. This contract has most, if not all, of the IR35 friendly clauses you would typically see in a standard PCG Contract, plus additional clauses covering payment of earned fees and the all important exit aspects of any consultancy contract.
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