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.
When a project starts heading south, you would think that the rats would start abandoning the ship and the sponsor would quickly pull the plug to minimize losses. But that’s not what happens. Sponsors’ commitment to projects going bad actually seems to grow. The literature is littered with examples of sponsors continuing to spend money on a project that is …
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 Commit Themselves to Failure”) of …
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. You can try to …
“Unsuccessful people look for the right person — someone who can save them…” I review Lichtenberg’s It’s Not Business, It’s Personal
Software projects are almost always late and underdone. Most executives take it for granted nowadays that developers will turn in something other than what was requested for more than was announced. They even admit that this is one of the biggest reasons that they outsource, because the contracts with outsourcers force the organization to develop software in a rational way. …
Alan Downs is a very successful executive coach who has worked the inside of a large corporation himself. He is even the author of an intriguing memoir of sorts about axing huge numbers of the employees for the corporation. The Fearless Executive rejects the very premise of the title: there are no fearless executives, only executives who face and work …
Even though they are continuing to spend millions every year, the project has almost no chance of success for entirely organizational reasons.
this year. Regretfully, I didn’t attend but I have been pouring through the proceedings. As I promised months ago, this post highlights some of the more interesting points for those of us doing access control technologies for software systems.
