Who's Your Data?

You remember Y2K. That was the event that led to the entire collapse of the worldwide banking system and the loss of every significant electric power grid in the Eastern United States at exactly 12:01 a.m. on January 1, 2000. Apparently one lone System Engineer in South Dakota at a small regional bank branch forgot to expand his date fields. Worldwide chaos ensued. Remember that?

Fortunately, our Y2K project had gone smoothly and was off the grid. While we waited for the curtain to come back up “Dave” told me about a not so successful software project at a large federal government agency. The agency had attempted to upgrade a major application. Many millions of dollars later the agency abandoned the upgrade. People were fired, system integrators were disintegrated and vendors were hung out to dry.

I asked “Dave” what had happened. He said it was management. Too many change requests combined with unrealistic expectations. I was certain that management would have a different view. In a make-believe survey I took, 7 out of 10 fictitious Executive types (this is a blog not a doctoral thesis) blamed their project failures on…something else. The salesperson lied, the contractor sucked, the software was junk and the dog ate the installation manual.

“Dave’s” view was that all of the above had gone wrong. My list of top reasons for project failure would normally not include the software. I am pretty sure that people make things go right or screw things up. If the salesperson tells you that the new release of software includes a feature that temporarily suspends gravity, who’s the idiot? If a major software upgrade goes south (or north or east or west) start at the top, but don’t stop there. What was management’s direction at the beginning of the project? Did they include everyone in the process? Was the schedule realistic? Did everyone play nice?

When a project goes wrong there will be plenty of blame to go around…something with music, something with laughter, something for everyone, a comedy tonight.