Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

August 20, 2014

Not just the government’s playbook

Filed under: Programming,Project Management,Software Engineering — Patrick Durusau @ 3:59 pm

Not just the government’s playbook by Mike Loukides.

From the post:

Whenever I hear someone say that “government should be run like a business,” my first reaction is “do you know how badly most businesses are run?” Seriously. I do not want my government to run like a business — whether it’s like the local restaurants that pop up and die like wildflowers, or megacorporations that sell broken products, whether financial, automotive, or otherwise.

If you read some elements of the press, it’s easy to think that healthcare.gov is the first time that a website failed. And it’s easy to forget that a large non-government website was failing, in surprisingly similar ways, at roughly the same time. I’m talking about the Common App site, the site high school seniors use to apply to most colleges in the US. There were problems with pasting in essays, problems with accepting payments, problems with the app mysteriously hanging for hours, and more.

I don’t mean to pick on Common App; you’ve no doubt had your own experience with woefully bad online services: insurance companies, Internet providers, even online shopping. I’ve seen my doctor swear at the Epic electronic medical records application when it crashed repeatedly during an appointment. So, yes, the government builds bad software. So does private enterprise. All the time. According to TechRepublic, 68% of all software projects fail. We can debate why, and we can even debate the numbers, but there’s clearly a lot of software #fail out there — in industry, in non-profits, and yes, in government.

With that in mind, it’s worth looking at the U.S. CIO’s Digital Services Playbook. It’s not ideal, and in many respects, its flaws reveal its origins. But it’s pretty good, and should certainly serve as a model, not just for the government, but for any organization, small or large, that is building an online presence.

See Mike’s post for the extracted thirteen (13) principles (plays in Obama-speak) for software projects.

While everybody needs a reminder, what puzzles me is that none of the principles are new. That being the case, shouldn’t we be asking:

Why haven’t projects been following these rules?

Reasoning that if we (collectively) know what makes software projects succeed, what are the barrier to implementing those steps in all software projects?

Re-stating rules that we already know to be true, without more, isn’t very helpful. Projects that start tomorrow with have a fresh warning in their ears and commit the same errors that doom 68% of all other projects.

My favorite suggestion and the one I have seen violated most often is:

Bring in experienced teams

I am told, “…our staff don’t know how to do X, Y or Z….” That sounds to me like a personnel problem. In an IT recession, a problem that isn’t hard to fix. But no, the project has to succeed with IT staff known to lack the project management or technical skills to succeed. You can guess the outcome of such projects in advance.

The restatement of project rules isn’t a bad thing to have but your real challenge is going to be following them. Suggestions for everyone’s benefit welcome!

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