Cited:Feld, Charlie S. and Stoddard, Donna B. “Getting IT Right”. Harvard Business Review. Feb 2004:72-79
There have been a spat of IT articles in HBR in the past couple of years, showing that IT has finally made it from the weirdo to the standard practice status. “Getting IT Right” seems to follow from “The REAL New [...]

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INFOSEC has asked me to go down to talk to BIG about their massive training effort for programmers. It may lead to a part-time job � one week on, one week off � that pays pretty well, as I mentioned yesterday. I was a professional trainer at the start of my career, but it has [...]

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Don’t you love it when one thing that you’re reading collides with another thing you’re studying? The idea of m�tis has reminded me of something that I read some time back. This led me to see some connections between knowledge management, Requisiste Organization and wisdom. (And thanks to jmmj for conversation on this and some [...]

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For the past eleven years, Blaha and his associates have been reverse engineering software for evaluating products. He came up with some terrifying results.

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Mahmoud et al. say that introductory programming courses have unacceptable failure rates, with “reported withdrawal, failure and D-grade rates approaching 50%”. In an interesting take on the problem, they decided to change they way they teach instead of complaining that the students had to change.

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Since IT projects are particularly prone to ignoring risk and escalation of commitment, reviewing some of the research on how we make decisions will benefit any IT manager or PM.

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I’ve been reading a bit on escalation of commitment to a failing cause in IT projects, where a company continues to spend money on a project that is slipping (Denver International Airport’s baggage-handling fiasco) or has shown market failure (the Ford Edsel). Commitmet to projects actually seems to grow.
Urban Nulden of the Department of [...]

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There is a large body of work dealing with the escalation of commitment in IT projects, how managers continue to throw good money after bad, increasing their commitment to a project that has little chance of succeeding. For example, Gustavo Dimello has an interesting summary (“To Pull or Not To Pull the Plug: When Managers [...]

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This week I am coaching a small IT consulting company in how to network and make cold calls to get more business. As a result, I’ve been reading a bit on networking and business relationships. And reading for business always leads me to think about the church. Here’s this week’s Big Truth:
It’s about persons, stupid.

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“Unsuccessful people look for the right person — someone who can save them…” I review Lichtenberg’s It’s Not Business, It’s Personal

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