IT Hire Wire

All day long, IT Project Managers and Business Analysts are fighting the requirement battles, scope creep, and timeline crunches that make tech tick. It’s the select few that step away from their experiences long enough to write about it. Gather ’round as I find you stories from the field. 

Project Management Disaster: Time Driven Projects

The Angry Aussie speaks his mind on IT projects driven by arbitrary dates.

“It’s bad enough when you have to deal with a project manager who wants you to bow down before their Gantt chart as if it’s Holy Scripture. But I have actually worked on multi-million dollar projects where all activity is driven by the fact that someone in senior management has said it should be done by a certain date.”

When he revealed the complexity of the project to the sponsor, he received the classic response…throw more people at the problem. I’d say it is the rare manager outside of the IT department that fully grasps the complexity of anything they are asking for. If they were to open their eyes and watch any project, from landscaping the backyard to catering a banquet, there is a tipping point where more people only make things slower and more chaotic.

The Methodology About Nothing

hsylves at ITToolbox gives us a humorous 4 part tale about an IT project driven by a developer and a prototype rather than solid Business Analysis.

“Foolish BA” the Keeper of THE WAY chuckled - “Don’t worry. We’ll prototype something and then we’ll build it and if it isn’t what you need we’ll just do it again. That’s THE WAY and no one shall challenge it - but show up each and every day for 15 minutes and stand before us while we crow our good fortune and genius.”

Read the ‘Epic’ (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4)

The best part of this story is that the author leaves it an unresolved cliffhanger at the end of part 4. It is as if the blogging BA was offed by someone on the project team before she could complete her story. We’ll never know.

Whether your IT projects play out like a great web video series or you just have one bad day in an otherwise smooth assignment, we love to hear about your real experiences.

Let us know what’s going on in the trenches.

photo by newneonunion

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