Karim Vaes

Check out “Anatomy of a runaway IT project” by Bruce F. Webster.

The following document is the actual text — carefully redacted — of a memo I wrote some time back [i.e., several years ago] after performing an IT project review; names and identifying concepts have been changed to preserve confidentiality (and protect the guilty). The project in question was a major IT re-engineering effort for a mission-critical system; at the time I did this review, the project had been going on for several years and had cost millions of dollars; it would eventually be canceled and the work products abandoned. The memo itself provides an interesting glimpse into just how a major IT project can go so far off the tracks that nothing useful is ever delivered.

It should be a schoolbook example of what can happen if you fail to do proper project management on projects. Some might find this has a “days of our lives” factor (tv soap), yet you might be astonished when you see the amount of projects that actually succeed in their objectives (16%).

Last Note
Credits to Geek&Poke for the cartoon; they mentioned a link to zdnet about the triangle for project management, yet I found that it took the wrong perspective… If you’re interested in this, check out an older post of mine about the devil’s triangle of project management.