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."

Comments

Re:Themocline of Truth

[NMerriam]

At my previous employer, I remember so many times running into people just not wanting to face the truth to maintain political quagmire and then when the project goes live it's nothing but spin despite massive failures or high support costs.

Are you Scott McClellan?

squandered brain trust

[Gary W. Longsine]

There are other effects, similar to that, in the US and elsewhere in the world. Consider Africa, where a confluence of war, famine, and AIDS have basically decimated a continent.

Entrenched poverty, and related gang and drug activity has combined with discrimination or bias in the judicial system in the US with the result being so many black men are in prison that it's affecting the demographics of the Republican party's most sacred institution, marriage. Of course, they are so concerned about preventing gay men and women from participating in the sanctity of marriage, whatever that means, that they haven't noticed so many of our nation's daughters will fail to follow God's sacred instructions to be fruitful and multiply, within the sanctity of marriage.

Consider that lead exposure, and probably mercury exposure, too, knock IQ points off the potential of those exposed. How much better off would this nation be if we hadn't exposed generations of kids (including the generations holding office today) to lead exposure? Hey, you Baby Boomers, do you think your kids are smarter than you? Well, guess what, they are. Kids under the age of about 25 or 30 in this country didn't grow up breathing lead fumes. If we would stop spewing mercury all over the atmosphere and oceans we could probably get another five points.