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 Economy” and “IT Doesn’t Matter”. Charlie S. Feld and Donna B. Stoddard make an argument for “three interdependent, interrelated, …
How Do You Know If The Training Was Worth It?
While reviewing training literature recently, I stumbled on Daniel R. Tobin’s The Knowledge-Enabled Organization: Moving from “Training” to “Learning” to Meet Business Goals through some serendipitous web searches. My enquiry first led me to his website that dealt with “The Fallacy of ROI Calculations for Training“. An obvious ploy to perk up my ears. The article is an abbreviated version …
It All Comes Together
Mètis — “practical intelligence, using conjectural and oblique knowledge, which anticipates, modifies and influences the fate of events in adversity and ambiguity” according to Baumbard — has reminded me of something that I read some time back. This led me to see some connections between knowledge management, Elliott Jaques’s Requisite Organization and wisdom. (And thanks to jmmj for conversation on …
“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.
Risk Taking, Risk Management and Software Project Management
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.
The Abilene Paradox of Escalation of Commitment: How We Can All Agree To Go Over the Cliff
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 …
De-escalation of Commitment to Projects
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 …
It’s About Persons, Stupid!
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’…”
“Unsuccessful people look for the right person — someone who can save them…” I review Lichtenberg’s It’s Not Business, It’s Personal