IT Success! : Towards a New Model for Information Technology

?Fifty years after the birth of corporate computing, ITtoday is still characterized by 50-70% project failure rates. Whichis pretty scary when you come to think of it: either a goblin hascast a spell on a whole profession ? or that profession isdoing something fundamentally wrong?. IT Success! challenges the widespread assumption that anIT department is like a building contractor whose project managers,architects and engineers (all construction industry terms?)are supposed to deliver systems on schedule, within budget and tospec. Michael Gentle explains why this is not possible, and turnsconventional wisdom on its head by showing that: you cannot define an IT project in terms of contractual budgetsand schedules anything can change during the life of a project what is eventually delivered can never be what is actuallyneeded He proposes a new model for IT in which the traditionalclient/vendor relationship, with its contractual commitments, isreplaced by a shared risk/reward partnership geared towardsworkable results over time. Using real-world examples and a casestudy, the author walks you through the end-to-end processes of anIT department, covering subjects like demand management, investmentplanning, agile development and managing productionapplications.