IT Project Management: Not for the faint of heart

I don't often write about work stuff here, as the seven of you who have been reading consistently for a while likely could not care less about the silliness of IT projects. However, we've picked up a few new readers (well, one - hi, Victor) who may actually find this amusing.

Here is a blog post from one Bruce Webster. Bruce is an internationally recognized expert on IT... well, you can read his bio as well as I can. To summarize, the dude seems to have a bit of cred.

In this post, Bruce offers a sanitized version of a memo he wrote describing the imminent failure of a mission-critical IT project being (poorly) executed for a major firm of some sort. It's not so much funny as it is scary.

Having been involved in a few disastrous technology projects in my time (the acronym "CFS" can still reduce me to tears), I can tell you that this is somewhat more common than you might think.

Best passage from the post:

The code base is very fragile. A lot of it is bad old code that BigFirm didn’t have time to rewrite two years ago, but now is five times its original size and even worse. One consultant said he took a code listing, picked pages at random, and found problems on every page he selected.

Oh dear. I have been there, my brother!