Bob Lambert » Page 3

Business requirements up front

Mar 312010

“Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.” – Pablo Picasso

It is an old story: about 30% of IT application projects succeed, 45% are “challenged,” and the other quarter fail altogether. That’s the consistent result over the years of the Standish Group Study of Project Outcomes. Jorge Dominguez, here, displays a chart of the remarkably similar results since 1994. Not a pretty picture, right? Some question the validity of the Standish studies, but Scott Ambler parallels the Standish story in a recent Dr Dobbs column called “Lies, Great Lies, and Software Development Project Plans,” which itemizes the strategies commonly used by IT project managers to “stay out of trouble” when schedule/budget results don’t match initial estimates. For example, “18% change the original schedule to reflect the actual results”. Continue reading »

We like databases

IT 3 Responses »

Mar 252010

I was preparing a presentation about databases and thought of a Dilbert strip I’d seen years ago. Easily distracted, I searched for it. I didn’t find the strip itself, but here’s the transcript I found:

Boss: I just got our consultant report and he has identified our biggest problem

Wally: I recommend that we build a tracking database

Dilbert: We can put it on the network

Boss: Would you like to hear what the problem is first?

Wally: I hate to dwell on the negative

Dilbert: We like databases

Boss: You haven’t heard what the problem is yet, how could you recommend building a database to resolve it?

Wally: We always build a database

Dilbert: And we will need coffee mugs for the project team.

Boss: The problem is that we have poor process

Wally: That could be the slogan on our mugs.

The Grateful Dead as strategic managers

Business No Responses »

Feb 242010

The March 2010 issue of The Atlantic features an article called “Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead.” It’s a great read, especially the second half, which tells of the band’s innovations in organization, fan loyalty, and, perhaps counterintuitively, creating value by freely giving away their product. The success of these measures seems self evident: the Dead were “one of the most profitable bands of all time” and almost singlehandedly created an entire product category, jam bands. As a result, the article recounts, the Dead are replacing companies like Southwest Airlines and GE as management training examples of strategic innovators.

As good as it is, to me the article conjured an unlikely vision of the Dead as business men in hippie drag self-consciously making strategy decisions that altered the marketing landscape. I agree that the Dead took the actions cited on purpose, but I believe core product, not marketing strategy, consumed the band’s energies during its formative and peak years. Could it be that their innovative market strategies grew organically from a quality product, where quality included the entire fan experience? Continue reading »

Groupthink and the Agile Architect

IT, Project Management No Responses »

Feb 152010

Need uber-guru types who are willing to challenge the existing groupthink on design and architecture, especially on TDD and emergent design and pair programming anti-pattern” – job post at Monster.com 2/9/2010

I stumbled upon that quote following links on the role of the architect on an agile project. Maybe one important role of the architect is to help the team avoid groupthink. Continue reading »

SQL Saturday Richmond, coming Saturday 1/30

IT No Responses »

Jan 172010

Update 1/28/2010: Saturday’s event postponed to April 10 due to threat of inclement weather Continue reading »

On DW federation, whac-a-mole, and integrating business data

Data Management, IT No Responses »

Jan 022010

Information Management recently sent around their pick of best IM blog articles of 2009. Among them was Forrester’s James Kobelius’s reaction to Bill Inmon’s “incineration of a straw man concept that he refers to as ‘virtual data warehousing (DW).’”

According to Mr. Inmon, virtual data warehousing reminds him of the carnival game called whac-a-mole. He says “just when you think this incredibly inane idea has died and just when someone has delivered what should have been a deathly blow, out it pops again from another hole.” Continue reading »

Data and Wine?

Other 1 Response »

Nov 142009

Great together, check this out:

DataAndWine

Followership II – Individualists, Enablers, & Subversives

Project Management No Responses »

Nov 012009

In a previous post I posed this question: “more people are followers than leaders, so isn’t it more important to cultivate effective followership than effective leadership?” In reality the distinction between leading and following isn’t very interesting. The goal of each member of a group should be to contribute to individual and shared goals in a balanced manner and promote the dignity of group members. In every group effort, whether business, charity, sports, or anything else, everyone leads and everyone follows.

I recently read Testimony, Solomon Volkov’s controversial publication of the memoirs of Dimitri Shostakovich, the great 20th century Russian composer. There were three different individuals in the book who demonstrated three different ways of “leading”, or behaving with character within a group. (See the note at the end of this post on the question of authenticity) Continue reading »

Stuck inside of problems with the business blues again?

IT No Responses »

Sep 172009

Elements of IT Architecture

Many see IT as application of technology to solve business problems.

Of course, this is true but it leaves out the third element, which is to apply the right architectural pattern to solve the problem. For example, when the business problem is that reporting is slow and reports from different departments don’t match, the astute IT professional immediately thinks in terms of a data warehousing pattern employing technologies like databases, extract-transform-load (ETL) tools, and multi-dimensional reporting suites. Continue reading »

Cloud databases and business/IT alignment

Data Management, IT No Responses »

Aug 232009

Today, the foundation of most of our custom-built systems is a relational dbms. While development frameworks vary, they overwhelmingly access and maintain data in relational tables and columns. As I write I routinely save this post in a MySQL database, and at work I tend SQL Server applications. Millions of others develop, use, and extract analytical data from thousands of SQL Server, DB2, and Oracle applications, on servers and networks maintained in-house by in-house administrators. Continue reading »

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