Award Winning Speech

Award Winning Speech

Friday, December 30, 2011

The day I saw Parliament worked like a team on a failed IT project

I couldn't hide my sad strained chuckle and hence the satirical take on what unfolded in Parliament on Lokpal debate on both houses.

IT as an industry is still learning from matured industries and best practices from various institutions set up earlier. Hence late nights, unrealistic deadlines, strained/stressed/harangued employees putting in multiple days without seeing sun set or rise, missing to understand stakeholders tacit needs, open scope leaving wide gaps to sneak in huge changes, vague terms and specs that are intrepreted multiple ways, training diverse teams that are recruited just before live critical periods in projects, constraints driven deliveries and relying on past sign offs to push through to unsatisfied clients, mis-understood and often introverted communications, are common traits across failed IT projects.

IT managers can now cite that even age-old institutions like Indian Parliament and a great marquee project for Government like Lokpal still failed to deliver a result for the same reasons above that fails IT projects.  

For IT, atleast, SCRUM and Agile has been a good blue pill to turnaround hopeless situation to see through a hope. May be Lokpal project team next time can follow SCRUM for

1. Talking to Stakeholders continously.

2.  Create a good backlog of issues and clauses required.

3.  Prioritize (Implement in Sprints).

4. Take incremental workable solutions and continue improving and implementing new features.

5. Retrospect at every sprint and SHARE and implement them.

 

Just rubbing in some free advice as if it is not in abundance. :)

  #Lokpal #sad  #Parliament

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Learning Practice by Shrinivasan.G is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 India License All views expressed here are my own and does not reflect that of my employer or clients or any other sources.
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