Trends: Bad Business Managers Create Bad Software Projects

Many reasons have been given for project failure in the Information Technology field. Practically all of them relate to the technical areas, all of which are directed at poor technical management.

However, it is never emphasized where these problems actually start; their source as they say. It is true that we have plenty of bad technical managers in the IT field. Yet, who hires these people; the business managers who run the company. And who are these people?

If one were to read Joel Bakan’s highly acclaimed treatise, “The Corporation” you would get a very good idea who these people are. For the most part they are swindlers, dishonest to the core, suffer from severe personality disorders, and solely devoted to the pursuit of profit. All of this has been continuously well documented over the years with little mention when concerned with software development, which is an engineering profession.

And the further up the “food chain” in a corporation you go the less intelligence is to be found. Is it any wonder that so many companies are now suffering at the hands of incompetent CEOs along with their lackey assistants? CitiCorp is just a prime example of the disasters such management are capable of creating. And they in turn are well encouraged and supported by the United States government in their activities. Maybe we should blame all such failure on the Office of the President of the US since it is this office that so often makes such horrendous policy as to allow such incompetence to reign in Corporate America.

Getting back to reality though, the problem with business managers is a serious one since it is they who set the environments within which we as professional software engineers work. They are the ones that hire the hordes of technical managers that have little or no required backbone to “push back” when bad project requests are glaringly obvious or the ones who too often think they can do anything as long as they push their people hard and long enough.

Once such managers are ensconced in a software organization there really is very little hope of rectifying the issue with proposals of recognized software development standards to improve processes which are currently producing high levels of defect rates. Such managers are not interested in process change but band-aid approaches to current problems so they can move on to the more important stuff of creating another disaster for themselves.

The excuse often used by both technical managers and their masters is that the company does not have the time to implement thoughtful development processes. Their thinking being that if the company actually did something right they would fall behind their competitors. Of course these same people don’t seem to realize that their competitors are often as foolish as they are, making the same irrational decisions against the same excuses.

As a result, it will fall to that lone company that wants to create good results by implementing such standards that will basically defeat all those other companies that continue to use the excuse that they simply don’t have the time.

British Telecom is a classic example of a company that decided that “fly-by-night” software development was no longer the path they wanted in their IT organization and in three years redeveloped the entire culture around “Agile” development practices.

Now, I am not necessarily a proponent of all of the concepts that fall within the “Agile” development model but for British Telecom this model is working quite successfully so the company should be looked to as a model for such re-development of what is more or less a cultural aspect of the business environment.

My last place of employment paid a lot of lip-service to such a change but when I took the initiative to promote the actual processes required to fulfill their ideas they were rejected out of hand with more political posturing than would have been expected. Politics here was the reigning consideration over anything else.

Of course the question posed by many software engineers is what should they do in such circumstances and my best advice is to simply leave and start your own business for which there is expected growing opportunity as the IT field itself is preparing for a massive skills shortage in the next few years.

And if more software engineers cooperated with each other to develop their own small businesses instead of simply working for a large company, established concerns would slowly be forced to compete with the smaller software houses that were offering more reliable services and development than in-house situations currently provide.

Of course, US companies won’t want to pay the price for such services but they are finding that instead of stuffing so much profit into senior managers’ wallets they are going to have to give some of it to software development since the price of our services , talents, and capabilities are starting to increase substantially on a world-wide scale leaving all these cost-cutters with no real place to go for cheap labor.

This is what I mean by a complete lack of intelligence at the top of the corporate structure since greed and personal agenda trumps such lowly traits as common-sense. Our corporate leaders in their pursuit of short-term profits have actually created a self-induced skills-shortage in the United States by creating such inhospitable environments for quality professionals to work in or even talented prospective professionals wanting to enter the field that they off-shored the development of such talent on a world-wide scale leaving all of us in a veritable driver’s seat.

Now when you look at this process from a strategic standpoint you can easily understand why bad business managers are the source for bad project development. And don’t worry, they will never learn. They simply don’t have the brains…

See the BCS “Study in Project Failure” here…