it project

Frank Hayes: Hard questions needed to save projects

Submitted by Bryan on March 17, 2008 - 5:44am

"What now? That's the hard question. When an
IT project is in trouble, it's easy to ask what went wrong and who's to
blame. Easy and popular. And fun, if you're not on the hot seat. But
what to do to save the project? That's harder -- a lot harder.
Especially when, as with the U.S. Census Bureau's "paperless census" project, it can't be killed and can't be delayed."

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Quoting IT: Learning from other projects

Submitted by Bryan on November 15, 2007 - 6:35pm

"While Drupal's growth is impressive, it won't be reaching its potential if it resists incorporating learnings from other systems (e.g. 'this is Drupal, not Wordpress')."

- theneemies, "Chris Messina's Drupal 6 review", Open Source Community,
November 14, 2007

 

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Getting more work done through less innovation

Submitted by Bryan on July 3, 2007 - 4:55am
The biggest reward I get from working on IT projects is the opportunity to take new ideas and new strategies and piece them together into something that has never been done before.  Even when I'm not the one originating the new idea, I like helping other innovative people bring their ideas to the table.  I have ideas, dreams, and aspirations to help take my workplace to the next level of where it should be via innovative use of what I know best, information technology.  How could innovation and all these wonderful ideas I have in my head not be anything but a good thing for my organization?  A recent article in the Wall Street Journal answers just that question by saying that there are negatives for an organization that innovates too much.

In "How Innovation Can Be Too Much of a Good Thing", George Anders writes about how companies and business consultants are rediscovering that less innovation can produce better business results.  Companies that used to push the limit in efficiency are finding that they're "jamming too many new ideas into a product pipeline, without enough slack time to ensure that critical tasks stayed on schedule".

Similar insights have been standard wisdom on the manufacturing floor for decades. Factory managers learn about bottlenecks through the formal discipline of queuing theory. That teaches them to keep a little slack in the system to handle the unpredictable -- but inevitable -- crunch times.

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pingVision: Project Management with Drupal

Submitted by Bryan on June 6, 2007 - 11:43am
"Two of the challenges faced in every project are the task of identifying milestones and distribution of work. Many systems and methodologies have been created to help address these issues but there is little information about using these practices in Drupal development. This post is an attempt to identify a methodology and tool set for managing the development of a Drupal based project."

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Identifying Open Source Winners and Losers

Submitted by Bryan on February 6, 2007 - 11:02am
Very interesting article from InformationWeek, How to Tell the Open Source Winners from the Losers.
There are 139,834 open source projects under way on SourceForge, the popular open source hosting site. Five years from now, only a handful of those projects will be remembered for making lasting contributions--most will remain in niches, unnoticed by the rest of the world. For every Linux, Apache, or MySQL, dozens of other open source efforts fizzle out.

That's a dilemma for the many companies that are expanding their use of open source. Corporate developers and other IT professionals must get better at divining the winners and ignoring the losers. The wrong picks can lead companies down a rat hole of support problems and obsolete software.
Not sure if I agree with everything in the article.  For example, the 9-point checklist  of what is required for a successful open source project is surely up for debate.  However, the article is a very good starting point for companies and their IT managers to identify the more successful projects.   According to the article, some of the up-and-comers in open source include Alfresco (CMS), Subversion (version control), and Hyperic (system management).

It's funny though, I remember visiting SourceForge quite a bit years ago.  These days though, I seem to find the project directory through "word of mouth" via the blogs.  Amazing how blogging continues to change the IT landscape.
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Quoting IT: IT Projects

Submitted by Bryan on October 19, 2006 - 8:39pm

"There is no such thing as an ‘IT project.’ There are only business projects with an IT component."

June Drewry, CIO of Chubb Corp as quoted in "20 Tips to Get Promoted in the Tech Industry", InfoWorld, October 16, 2006

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