In my last post, I talked about the importance of decision making and the sheer number of decisions that have to be made during a project. Clearly, every decision should not take a meeting of 30 people, and three hours. Though, I can say that I have seen cases where that happens, and it is every bit as paralyzing as you would expect.
You need to have every person on the team making decisions that are appropriate to their scope of responsibility. […]
In a prior post, I gave a potential example of a flawed decision making process. But at least a decision was made. A maxim that I’ve carried with me throughout my career is..
Every project failure that I have seen can be traced to non-decisions or uninformed decisions. Now, I realize that this is a contentious statement. If you look at research into why projects fail, the decision making process, if it’s […]
A key component of most of my engagements is understanding and documenting a client’s existing business drivers, people, process, infrastructure and terminology (geez, that’s a mouthful) as it relates to customer care in the client operation.
The reason is that my world view and experience is different than the client’s. Unless I truly feel comfortable conversing in the client world, I will make incorrect assumptions based on my experience and I will miss critical stuff.
In our working world, the problems and frustrations […]
On a recent drive to Kingston, I saw a sign that said “Town of Greater Napanee. Greater for Many Reasons”
Well, that’s different.
Before I comment further, let me start out by saying that Napanee is a really nice little town with really nice people…
Now, I know that the intent was to play on their name of Greater Napanee (birthplace of Avril Lavigne – the more you know…). But, c’mon, I can’t imagine I’m the only person who drove by thinking, “Greater for […]
I was following a thread on Reddit where IT people were exchanging stories about the, for the lack of a better word, “bonehead” things that their users reported. Most stories carried an aura of IT superiority, and the whole thread rubbed me the wrong way.
We’ve come a long way in making computers and applications easier to use. The graphical interface of our Windows and Macs have converged and have become effectively standardized. Once the basics are down, most of us can […]
Some years ago, a Senior VP friend of mine asked me to help on a troubled Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software implementation. At the time, his company was a rapidly growing investment darling. The implementation of a “big-boy” package was being done by one of the top (i.e. really expensive) consulting/professional services organizations.
I found myself sitting in a configuration meeting, being asked to set values for the “Business”, “Corporation” and “Organization” fields. Having a nominal grasp on English language, and the concept […]
When I was starting my career, one of the axioms was “Nobody was ever fired for buying IBM”. IBM was the market gorilla so IBM was safe. Safe not only in IT’s mind, but in the C-Suite, who actually had heard of IBM.
Today, for IBM you could substitute Cisco, Salesforce, SAP, even Microsoft. Market dominance implies safety.
Even though it’s possibly THE best technology marketing message ever created, it’s not true. People get fired for making the safe choice. I’ve seen it. […]
In my last post, I talked about how critical it it to fully understand the business needs at the beginning of an IT project. Let’s look at a few of the reasons that this can go wrong.
IT projects represent the translation of business needs into a business tool.
How do we get there? Well, you have to:
In my experience, fully understanding the business needs is the most critical and difficult part. Get that wrong, and you’ll be building the wrong thing.
Within that context, […]
Google “Failed IT projects statistics”, and click on a few of the returned links. Go on. I’ll wait.
Pretty gruesome, right? From a McKinsey study, the one that really sticks out is that “17% of (large) IT projects go so badly that they threaten the very existence of the company”! You’re a CIO, and you could be looking at a 1 in 6 chance of killing your company? Let that career ending statistic sink in for a minute.
OK… why? From […]
