IT No-No's
InfoWorld's cover story is "The Top 20 IT Mistakes," and it's a rogues' gallery indeed. Amusingly, many are the converse of another: For example, "botching your outsourcing strategy" vs. "offshoring with blinders on."
The moral I take away is that many of these are not "IT" mistakes—they're people mistakes. Ones like "discounting internal security threats" are obvious enough; depending on whether you believe Gartner, 70% of security incidents involving an actual loss are inside jobs. But others, while less blatant, are still at bottom people issues:
- "promoting the wrong people:" Well, sure; don't assume your top technologist deserves or wants a management position.
- "mishandling change management:" Change is a constant, but so is people's resistance to same. You must anticipate this and bake it in to your project planning.
- "mismanaging software development:" Which most frequently occurs when frustrated IT managers throw more and more of the "mythical man-month" at a tardy or delayed project. The solution instead is to find better programmers; "almost nothing else matters, really."
- "letting engineers do their own QA:" Res ipsa loquitur.
I recommend you read it all—and this goes double for those of you in the audience who are not in IT management. This is a devil you need to know.
http://www.bmacewen.com/blog/archives/2004/11/it_nonos.html
