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Anatomy of a Runaway Project
JCWDenton recommends a piece by Bruce Webster revealing some insights into a failed multi-million-dollar IT project. "The following document is the actual text — carefully redacted — of a memo I wrote some time back after performing an IT project review; names and identifying concepts have been changed to preserve confidentiality (and protect the guilty). The project in question was a major IT re-engineering effort for a mission-critical system; at the time I did this review, the project had been going on for several years and had cost millions of dollars; it would eventually be canceled and the work products abandoned. The memo itself provides an interesting glimpse into just how a major IT project can go so far off the tracks that nothing useful is ever delivered."
From TFA:
The FUBAR project keeps being touted as a world-class development team, but it is not producing world-class, or even minimally-professional, results. This already shows up in the project delays and quality issues of the releases to date. What the team is producing will not only be very difficult to support and modify, it will in all likelihood be unusable, resulting in a complete failure of the FUBAR project.
Sounds like Vista to me...
That "FUBAR" project is Duke Nuke Em Forever.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I first read this as "Anatomy of Runway Project" and thought of Heidi Klum.
I am *so* disappointed with the actual article...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The thing is, 5,000 engineers horsing around isn't the same thing as a 5,000 horsepower engine.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I wonder if their server is the failed project...
Circumcision is child abuse.
Like I always say: Winsom, lose some.
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That's the first time in 1,640 posts you've said "Winsom, lose some", you big fibber.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
The text is anonymized. The original was probably about rewriting 24 000 lines of the project in VB as ~200 lines of Perl, and that the project ran on high-end Windows XP Home servers, all with the same serial key.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.