By bfwebster on Sep 24, 2008 in Articles, Baseline, Development, IT Project Management, Main, Management, Quality assurance, Software engineering, Surviving Complexity | 0 Comments
The first column, “Second Class Software Quality for Major IT Projects”, talks about the curious fact that organizations are willing to spend millions, tens of millions, even hundred of millions of dollars on major IT project and yet still nickle-and-dime their software quality assurance (SQA) effort. It doesn’t help that SQA personnel are pretty much [...]
By bfwebster on Aug 29, 2008 in Admin, Articles, Baseline, Development, Main, Maintenance, Technology | 0 Comments
If it’s Friday, it must be another Baseline column. This one talks about the issues surrounding whether to build or buy software:
The other day, an IT colleague of mine mentioned a conflict at a corporation where he’s working. The corporation has a mission-critical application deployed across a large number of workstations. The set [...]
By bfwebster on Aug 22, 2008 in Articles, Baseline, IT Project Management, Main, Politics, Surviving Complexity | 0 Comments
Yes, it’s my latest Baseline column:
Last week, I talked about some of the reasons why large organizations often reject the best solutions for a troubled IT project: fear, pride, budget, and the ever-present internal politics. This week, as promised, I will talk about what it takes to champion the right solution. I can’t guarantee that [...]
By bfwebster on Aug 15, 2008 in Articles, Baseline, Main, Management, Surviving Complexity | 0 Comments
I have a new Baseline column up on the tendency of large organizations to reject the best solutions for a troubled IT project:
The consultants, usually with the help of the employees in the trenches, would use their time, effort, and expertise to analyze the system under development or in production. They would arrive at a [...]
By bfwebster on Aug 7, 2008 in Articles, Baseline, Development, IT Project Management, Main, Surviving Complexity | 0 Comments
My latest Baseline column talks about the risks that follow a successful IT project:
But sometimes with projects that really shouldn’t succeed—that are attempting too much, too fast, with too many risks—enough things go right, particularly along the critical paths, enough superhuman effort is made by those involved, so that the project does indeed go into [...]