Wednesday, April 20, 2011

projects failing. lessons learned.

Having been involved in several engagements past months, I took some lessons from what I consider to be good technology with bad implementations. These were not necessarily failed projects but I had a feeling of unaccomplished work. And this is because I am usually passionate about the technology I work with and I want to drag people with me, which didn't happened. Why I had these mixed feelings and the lessons I draw:

Lesson 1. Project Scope. Define the scope of your project and DO NOT cease to pressures by either your sales or customer. DO NOT accept further changes in scope without estimating impact and effort implied. Otherwise you will usually end up with more effort spend, which will translate into business issues on your side.

Lesson 2. Team skills. This is a point where the project itself needs to be planned around building or gathering the proper technical skills. Without that, I learned the hard way that nobody on customer side will ever be able to takeover your work. On the other side, not having the proper team skills upfront will again end up with more effort spend on the project.

Lesson 3. Project Setup itself. If you're working with people not willing to listen or not able to understand what you're saying, project will not end up in good conditions.

Lesson 4. I give pretty good estimates on activities part of different WBS. This last one is for me to compensate the above three points :)

IBM WebSphere clip

Didn't knew WebSphere emerged in 1998, the year I started my career in IT.

However, WebSphere is currently laying around in most IBM products, across all IBM brands. Such examples I'm aware of: WebSphere Portal, WebSphere Process Server, Tivoli Access Manager, DB2 CM, FileNet.

One good piece of technology which worth the learning effort. Java developers will eventually hit some WebSphere install to code against. And when they do, they usually have a steeper learning curve, where is the point to guide them towards InfoCenters and Redbooks :)

update: right, just related to above paragraph, any java dev can use it, for fun or business.