Pushing the Envelope: Managing Very Large Projects

by Ken Orr

Serious engineering disciplines devote enormous amounts of time and effort to researching failures, documenting what happened and why. When a bridge, a building, or a walkway in a hotel collapses, careful analysis of the cause follows. The same is true of transportation failures. In the US, when airplanes, trains, or ships collide with something, the National Transportation Safety Board teams are among the first to arrive on-site. In our domain, however, IT is not nearly as good at analyzing its failure. While IT should be good at this, it isn't.