If business projects are part of your profession, you know that many projects fail to live up to their potential. Some projects fail to achieve their schedule or budget goals or fail to deliver everything initially promised. Other projects simply fail altogether. Many of the problems faced by projects can be avoided, or at least contained, by effective project management practices.

On-time delivery 99.5% of the time would be wonderful -- right? Improved morale would lead to better staff retention and higher productivity -- right?

I've just come back from a week in India, where the most common question I was asked was "If there is a recession in the US, what impact will it have on the Indian IT industry?" As if to highlight the possibility of such an event, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan testified before the US Senate, on my second day in Bangalore, that the US economy had reached "zero growth." Nobody in India seems pa

One of the many roles of a modern IT organization is finding and introducing new technology that enhances its parent organization's business objectives. When properly executed, this role enables IT to bring real bottom-line value to its parent by enabling breakthroughs in products, services, operational effectiveness, and/or competitive differentiation.

A couple of months ago, I wrote an Advisor on IBM's new patterns for e-business. In essence, IBM has examined the work it has done for clients and identified and formalized the major, recurring ways in which companies have solved e-business problems. At the moment, IBM has documented eight high-level e-business patterns:

Risk management is a critical part of project management, but it has one major problem -- the word "risk." This word is ruining the subject, and we should do something about it.

The strategies, techniques, and skill sets that made IT executives successful in the past will not suffice today or in the foreseeable future. Rather than a technology manager, today's IT executive is a business integrator, the executive who can identify ways to use technology to achieve competitive advantage.

During the past six months, I have been training and mentoring managers, users, and developers from the armed forces, major defense contractors, medical insurance companies, state governments, electrical and telephone utilities, and world-class research organizations. In every case, I was taken by surprise in learning that people from these organizations were still trying to understand the basics of object orientation.

"Cut off their hands," sums up Alistair Cockburn's approach to software development. This admittedly graphic metaphor, Cockburn explains, comes from the early 1600s writing of Miyamoto Musashi, a Japanese samurai who was never defeated in a duel. Musashi's book on sword fighting techniques focuses on doing something in deadly earnest -- nothing minutely superfluous allowed.

In IT, we often reflexively retreat into our own world, even when it makes more sense to stay open to the rest of the business. Taking on the entire burden for developing and implementing a sourcing strategy is an example of this mistake. Keeping the business involved from the earliest planning through day-to-day execution not only makes sense, it also produces better results.

E-commerce is powered by an insatiable need for demographic, socioeconomic, and personal information to focus in on customers. Such information is beginning to acquire enormous financial value -- a new form of currency in the new e-economy. However, its use and storage is vulnerable to abuse, the potential for which grows daily.

"It takes longer to turn a good idea into good software than it should," Eric Lander claimed in an interview with Computerworld (4 January 1999). Lander is a pure mathematician who has been working on the Human Genome Project for many years. We all have our troubles getting the software we use to work smoothly. Lander's work is undoubtedly far more difficult than what most of us encounter.

"The project manager is the linchpin in the horizontal/vertical organizations we're creating."

As I suggested in last week's column, the uncertain state of the US economy "doesn't mean that [companies will] stop spending money on IT altogether, but it could mean a slower growth, or even a small decline." I'm not usually narcissistic enough to quote my own words, but I think it's important for ALL of us to be very careful with the words that we use to describe IT spending plans and strategies.