Even though they are continuing to spend millions every year, the project has almost no chance of success for entirely organizational reasons.
Teesside Confidentiality Model as presented at SACMAT
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.
Latest issue of COMPUTER actually useful
Wouldn’t you know it? The last issue that I have coming to me before I was going to end my IEEE Computer Society membership and it had to be interesting. I’ve been reading Computer for several years now and I’ve gotten to the point where I just pass it on to some other IT schmuck without actually opening it. I …
Elliott Jaques on Complexity, Simplicity and How It Won’t Get Easier
We’re not happy in positions that we don’t have the ability to do nor are we successful.
On Hierarchies and Requisite Organization
What have we lost in our rejection of hierarchy?
Jaques and Clement on Leadership and Subordinate Behaviours
In their book, Executive Leadership, Elliott Jaques and Stephen Clement make the point that almost any personality type can be an effective manager — role that contains leadership. (They go to lengths to make it clear that leadership does not exist outside of a particular role performance.) These personality quirks are irrelevant until they become disruptive to the organization or …
Trusted Advisor and Technical Consulting
The managers from a consulting firm I work with are sold on the “trusted advisor” idea. This comes from The Trusted Advisor by Charles Green, David Maister and Rob Galford (Free Press, 2000). They bantered this around in my friend’s performance review. I actually believe that trusted advisor ideas and “techniques” are solid, money-making and morally good. Unfortunately, I’m not …
Forecasting through Role Playing
http://www-marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/people/faculty/armstrong2.html#forecasting For example. Kesten C. Green has a great paper on the efficacy of role playing vs. game theory vs. individual assessment for conflicts involving small numbers of parties with a lot at stake. He finds that role playing is the only forecasting method he tested that actually predicts what will happen. http://www-marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/forecast/paperpdf/Greenforecastinginconflict.pdf Green did a study of how well …
IT Workers Strategize Differently About Problems
Role playing (and no, we are not talking about a gaming session of Warhamster) has been shown to greatly increase forecasting accuracy, yet it has a pretty bad reputation with the academy. Probably because it does not have a theoretical or mathematical background to it, but more of a three-year old feel
Project Management Methodologists vs. Theorists
Project management in software is hard for a variety of reasons. In the December 3, 2003 edition of the Application Developer Management e-newsletter, Scott Withrow tackled “Selecting a Project Manager”. While he is speaking of specifically ones for software development projects, his thoughts could represent the thinking of a range of business functions. Unfortunately, he gets a couple of points …