Posted by Kevin Brady on Sun 19th November 2006 at 11:07 PM, Filed in Industry News
As my regular readership well knows, my blog is a serious site dedicated to the improvement of project management and software development practices, with the aim of discovering new approaches, methods and solutions capable of making the currently stratospheric annual IT Project Failure rates of 70% + a thing of the past. However, today I am in the mood for going off message and talking about my recent holiday to Sunny Florida. I have travelled the length and breadth of America from Alaska to the Florida Keys but this trip has more than any other left a deep impression on me.
Two things come to mind when I reminisce about this great holiday - American patriotism & the heroes of the space programme.
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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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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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