Age of Invisible Disasters (2017)
I once read on Hacker News that in the future, the C-level people all need to be very strong in IT as any company or organisation nowadays is so much reliant on IT.<p>It&#x27;s also the message of the Phoenix Project book, which I did like.<p>The problem I have noticed is that although management does understand their businesses, it&#x27;s easy to bullshit them when it comes to IT. And they let it happen because they are not into IT and they don&#x27;t grok it. They would never treat other projects like this the same way when they would totally understand it.<p>I especially notice that as I read what higher management layers write about projects or effort, it&#x27;s high on fluffy &#x27;visionary&#x27; words but low on actual actionable vision that would help me to make every day decisions on what to prioritise.<p>I believe that the simple reason why IT projects fail is because of very mundane basic things.<p>But those are not sexy to write about. To me it&#x27;s all about:<p>- Why are we doing this?
- How would you define succes and failure for this project
- Who is responsible for what &#x2F; contact person
- How do we work with each other and detail this
- What are the guiding principles
- How do we assure quality
- How do we assure timely delivery
- What stuff do we need, gear, licenses, etc.
- P R E P A R A T I O N - do your homework, investigate things beforehand before you make choices.<p>I can go on and on. And it may bore you. But I think there is actually no true complexity involved in all those failing projects.<p>There is not something really special to IT projects. I wonder if we do pretend there is something special to them because we ourselves want to feel important in some sense.