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A personal weblog with photographs and comments. Quiet ramblings, quite rambling...
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- Watching Dolphin Watchers and Dolphins
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Recent entries with comments
- Indications of Autumn - (1)
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- My first experiences cycling in Paris - (2)
- A shrine on Limpsfield Road - (4)
- Zebra Crossing Part Two - (1)
- Courchevel - (2)
- Mersea Island - (2)
- Old school rice packaging - (1)
- Were you one of these car drivers in Oxted who nearly killed me yesterday? - (4)
- This Charming Man - (2)
- The Front of Hever Castle - (2)
- Barcelona sunset - a short time-lapse - (1)
- Ragwort - (1)
- Taking the goat - (3)
- Gay parking only - (2)
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Next entry: Shooting it up in the subway
Previous entry: Delhi Wala
If we were an ant colony we would fail
I will never forget this quote from a customer, commenting about problems on the project we were working on. I work on implementing large-scale Enterprise Software applications and it is always worth bearing in mind that such projects can fail, and that from time to time they do. As I understand the theory, most IT projects do fail when measured strictly by the four criteria of:
- Producing an agreed deliverable;
- On time;
- Within budget; and
- Following a successful process.
Most projects get around this by keeping the project sponsor happy and adjusting deadlines/budget/scope. Sometimes, as a consultant, you can make a difference. The rest of the time you are the dog with the nodding head riding along in the back window of a car.
Often we look to simplistic analogies to explain what we do. I recently stumbled across a conversation about this in the blogsophere. For example see Thomas Otter on Lego, Enterprise apps, Design, SOA and Hasso Plattner and Venture Chronicles on Lego blocks, software design mentality and random thoughts and the other articles they link to. My own thoughts are that people use Lego as a simplistic analogy to represent the engineering and construction industries, with which we have much in common. I still love Zachman’s Information Systems Architecture (ISA) Framework. Zachman drew the parallels between information systems architecture and classical architecture, and the need for us to adopt similar disciplines to deal with the complexity of our systems (Just google it).
Going back to the video above it refers to the case of Collin County, Texas vs Siemens Business Services. In 2004 Collin County signed a contract for 8 million US dollars with Siemens for SAP applications. Not long after, Siemens encountered problems meeting the contract’s requirements. In March 2005 after Collin County had already spent 1 million US dollars, Siemens stated they could not complete the project. As a result the County sued Siemens and SAP’s public-services unit for 10 million US dollars in damages. There’s an old article in Information Week. I don’t know what the current status of that case is.
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I also intended to link to Apolemia. I lost the link for a couple of days ...