They set out to understand why, if professional development is so important to their own careers and corporate performance, don’t more developers do it. They studied quite a few from several organizations and discovered, well, what I expected:
Know Your Projects’ IT Level of Complexity and Explode Up Your Success Rates
How do I consult to a non-Requisite Organization, one whose very organizational structure means that they will not succeed at this change? I can’t in good conscience tell them that whatever I suggest will have much of an effect on their performance as a group.
Simplifying Project Costing & Staffing with Requisite Organization’s Time Span of Discretion
I don’t think that I am going out on a limb when I say that short time horizons of project managers, sponsors and planners is the leading cause to the disastrous failure rate of IT projects… As Michelle says, “you want a consultant whose current capability at least equals that called for by the entire project, not just the time span of the planning phase.””
How Berners-Lee Finally Built Hypertext By Taking It Back 30 Years
There were lots of more interesting and much more robust systems that provided better access to knowledge. But they didn’t have Berners-Lee and his peculiar mix of vision and practicality. That mix was uncommon, and for innovators to be successful with bringing technology to change the world, they have to believe that they work for a greater good.
Building Architecture is a Lousy Metaphor for Software Development: We Need a New One
I think that using Construction as a metaphor has run its course of usefulness. It’s time to get another one.
Risky Monocultures: In Agriculture or IT Systems, It’s Bad Risk Taking
You wouldn’t think that books discussing agronomics would have much to say relevant to Organizational Structure, IT Management or Knowledge Management. You’d be wrong, of course, but you can see how people would think that. I’d like to show how some of the ideas being debated in the agricultural industry’s fringes can illuminate our own issues. James C. Scott, in …
Outsourcing IT? Why Not The Whole Company!
There. I’ve just shown how there is no need to have an insurance business in America. Send it all to India.
Measuring Software Project Size
I’ve mentioned articles by Phillip Armour of Corvus International (Deer Park, IL) before: he writes a regular feature in Communications of the ACM called “The Business of Software” and normally features some of the tougher, management-oriented problems of development. This month he tackles how software is measured and points out the ridiculous use of “Lines of Code” or LOC. (Of …
“database quality has improved little in 11 years…”
For the past eleven years, Blaha and his associates have been reverse engineering software for evaluating products. He came up with some terrifying results.
Making Learning Computer Programming Accessible For Normal Students
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.