Posted by Kevin Brady on Thu 29th June 2006 at 03:40 AM, Filed in Free Check Lists
Click Here For Free Download Hobbling Prevention Checklist
Once “Money Machine” Management Consultants /Software Houses get their foot in the door, they don’t just get busy helping you, they also get busy helping themselves. Finding new ways of emptying your bank account in the way that a spider eats it’s pray from the inside out is their game.
One of the well-trodden techniques they use I often refer to as “Hobbling”
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Posted by Kevin Brady on Tue 27th June 2006 at 03:02 AM, Filed in Free Check Lists
Click to download >> Anti-Spin Management Checklist
With reference to Posts like Get Sacking - Path To Project Success
It is clear that many failed or failing IT projects /programmes of work are victims of often elaborate spin management schemes :-
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During the week Computing Magazine, one of the best freebee computer magazines I know, dropped through the front door. All was going well until I reached the analysis section and Fig 1 :-
Fig 1 Government versus non-government adoption of AGILE
It states that AGILE another “No Pain High Gain” methodology is on the ascendance, and appears to be taking the intellectual high ground.
However, it looks to me like a suffocating fish trying to trash about in a useless attempt to find the next potential life saver. This trendily named method is nothing new, as I have come across it at various points throughout my IT career. However, in those days it was referred to as the SOP (Seat of the Pants) or JFDI (Just F***King Do It) development method. These names don’t sound so good do they? Such approaches to system development only work in a limited range of circumstance for systems of a particular type /level of complexity. In my view AGILE is nothing more than a posh word for hacking together software.
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This Post explains with an example from Microsoft how many corporations believe that sacking staff and especially managers is the path to better IT project /programme success rates.
Friends know at their cost, not to get me on the subject of IT project failures when dinning out. My passion for this subject knows no bounds, having spent the best part of 20 years studying “The Madness” i.e. project failure rates of between 70% and 91% with projects cancellation rates of approximately 30% (Standish Group Report).
CHAOS Standish Group Report and other surveys suggest many reasons for such failure rates. However, the ability of these surveys to get to the heart of the problem heavily depends on who’s asking the questions. Obviously a survey questionnaire prepared by a “heavy-weight” IT programme manager is going to look very different to a survey set-up and designed by a university academic. The key thing to remember when designing questionnaires is that:-
“You always have to know what you don’t know, to ask the write questions. This depends on experience”.
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During the early part of my Project /Programme Management career I decided it was important to get some programme /project auditing experience. I have to tell you that trying to find a company actually wanting to independently check on the status of its projects /programmes of work was like trying to find someone to volunteer for open heart surgery. Nevertheless, I believed then as I do now, that to become a great project /programme manager one needs to donate at least 2 working weeks to auditing each year. How on earth can one mentor managers, lead with gravitas, define an organisations IT strategy if you have not spent time looking into other peoples work and seeing for oneself what works and what plainly does not ?
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