Do computer projects still often go bad, even if staff are properly screened ?
Question:
(I searched on the net for 2 names on my project
- found one person, wounded attempting to rob a jewelry store in USA in the 70's.
- another person, a person of interest - last person seen with a person missing since the 70's.)
made me start wondering.
The point is, if you're a crim on the run, you may have a "movie star" persona that helps you in your job. So you have some desirable qualities for the job. These (at least in the case above) were far outweighed by character defects that destroyed the project
This is not to say that ex-crims shouldn't be employed - simply that there should be proper management.
Answer:
I would say in the majority that is not the case.
Out of the projects I have worked on in the last 25 years not one has had problems because of hiring practices - when things went astray it was never a single person who caused the failure. Although there were many which had "problem employees" for the most part these individuals at worst made the work harder, and the job environment less pleasant but did not cause the project to fail.
That being said; The majority of the projects I worked on have suffered from problems created for the most part by poor planning and poor management.
The worst problems were caused by well known "classic mistakes" - for examples,
- poorly defined project scope.
- wishful thinking as a way to determine the schedule (and consequently failing to meet such overly optimistic schedules)
- adding more people to a project that was already late without including their learning curve to a revised schedule, or impact on support resources (and once I remember management neglecting to modify the schedule at all - in spite of the missed deadline!)
- adding features to the design when a project had missed a milestone without increasing the schedule, causing the next milestone to be late and responding to that with another addition... this is perplexing since it seems to be a case of the manager trying to bargain for more work to excuse his own poor schedule estimate.
In fact there are many similar mistakes to watch out for;
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archive...
http://forums.construx.com/blogs/stevemc...
computers arn,t perfect yet, they can,t think by themselfs yet
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