Failures of Imagination and process in 68% of software projects: 2009 report

On the above subject you can find an article on the Software Development News website keyboarded by David Worthington. It shows that successful project management entails much more than just mapping out critical paths or ticking boxes. This ties in with what is taught on the Paris ESIEE Engineering School's Master's Program "Technological Innovation and Project Management - ITMP": 66% of projects fail or are severely handicapped not by technical or technological factors but by human factors, such as lack of creativity or imagination and poor process management.

Excerpts:

"Scores of well-publicized software failures have taken a toll on careers, lives and resources, yet projects continue to fail at an alarming rate. Top programming experts, though, say that there are commonalities to these failures that, if avoided, can help organizations achieve greater success.

Sixty-eight percent of software projects were either challenged or failed, according to The Standish Group's 2009 'Chaos' study, representing a 'marked decrease in project success rates' for the year. Challenged projects are defined as being late, over budget, or having less than the required features and functions.

The root causes of failure are not difficult to identify. 'Most cases of failure that I have seen have been in two categories: imagination and process,' said Grady Booch, chief scientist of software engineering at IBM Research."

Read the whole story:

Imagination, process failures doom software projects - SD Times: Software Development News

The RAF Nimrod disaster: an illustration of how bad organisational culture works against High Reliability

Yesterday evening I caught a part of Charles Haddon-Cave QC's presentation of his damning report into the 2 September 2006, RAF Nimrod XV230 disaster that resulted in 14 wholly avoidable deaths. He said repeatedly that the failure was one of organisational culture. It had reminded him of NASA's Columbia Space Shuttle disaster. A culture of airworthiness and high reliability had given way to a culture of cost-cutting. Respect of expertise had been replaced by respect of hierarchy. and deference to lax consultants.

Here is how the UK Guardian introduced what happened to RAF Nimrod and Haddon-Cave's report:

"On 2 September 2006, RAF Nimrod XV230, with 14 crew members on board, was on a routine reconnaissance mission over Helmand province in Afghanistan, looking out for insurgents.

It crashed shortly after a catastrophic fire broke out on board when it had been refuelled in mid-air. Faced with a dire emergency, every member of the crew of the 37-year-old aircraft acted with calmness, bravery and professionalism, but they had no chance of controlling the fire. "Their fate was sealed before the first fire warning," today's report concludes.

The devastating 586-page report, published amid apologies from the government and dismay from families of the lost men, suggests the aircraft was doomed years earlier by lamentable and systemic failings on the part of senior individuals and leading corporations, compounded by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) sacrificing safety to cut costs."

This brought to mind the book written by Karl E. Weick and Kathleen M. Sutcliffe, "Managing the Unexpected" (second edition, 2007) about sensemaking in high reliability organisations.

In the preface to the first edition Weick and Sutcliffe wrote:

"...We were looking at nuclear aircraft carriers, air traffic control systems, aircraft operations, hostage negotiation, emergency medical treatment, nuclear power generation, continuous processing firms, and wildland firefighting crews. These diverse organisations share a singular demand: They have no choice but to function reliably. If reliability is compromised, severe harm results. Adopting the controversial terminology first used at Berkeley, we lumped these organisations together and called them high reliability organisations (HROs)...

This book is about experts in assured high-performance and how they stay on top of operations, despite repeated interruptions. Part of their success in managing the unexpected stems from their uncommon success in finding ways to stay mindful about what is happening. They update their ideas of what is happening and are not trapped by old categories or crude renderings of the contexts they face..."

In the book Weick and Sutcliffe examine a couple of worst-practice cases to illustrate what happens, as with the Nimrod disaster, when organisations that should be highly reliable have in place the wrong organisational culture, one is NASA and the other is the English Bristol Royal Infirmary (BRI) where, between 1988 and 1994, the mortality rate for open-heart surgery in children under age one year was roughly double that of other centres in England.

Are hierarchical regional clusters more effective than the relational model?

That is the question raised by reading Keith Sawyer's October 27 blog post about research done by Bell, Tracey, and Heide. 2009.*

Below is an excerpt from his article, titled : "Regional clusters: more complex than you think".

Clusters are often assumed to work due to openness, collaboration, loose organizational boundaries, and information sharing. A new research paper* by Simon Bell, Paul Tracey, and Jan Hiede argues that it’s often more complex than this. They call this “standard” model of a cluster “a relational model of governance based on implicit rules and understandings.” And they point out that there is a lot of evidence for another type of successful cluster: one that’s hierarchically organized, with “unilateral rules originating from a dominating firm” (they cite several examples of research showing this, from the U.S. to England to Shanghai). The problem is that most research has only focused on the relational type of cluster, within which “innovation is an interactive and collective process requiring joint action on the part of cluster members” with “organic” interaction patterns between cluster members. A hierarchical cluster, in contrast, has “centralized decision making structures, rules, and formalized interactions.”

*Bell, Tracey, and Heide. 2009. The organization of regional clusters. Academy of Management Review, Vol. 34 No. 4, 623-642.

How to Reconcile Islam and Modern Science - an Algerian Astrophysician's View

I have had the pleasure of working in Algeria more than once. To stay up to date with what is happening in the country I often consult the online version of one of Algeria's national newspapers, El Watan. In today's edition there is a review of an important book that appeared in France at the end of 2008 the title of which can be translated as "In the Spirit of Ibn Rushd (Averroes) - The Reconciliation Between Islam and Modern Science"*. The author of the book is Nidhal Guessoum, the Algerian astrophysician who once worked at NASA and now teaches at the American University of Shardjah in the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Here is an excerpt from Salima Tlemçani's review: "(Nidhal Guessoum) bases his work in the methods of Ibn Rushd (Averroes). He invites his readers to adopt a moderate rational approach, discarding not only the approach posited on the presence of miraculous scientific content in the Qur'an but also creationism, scientism and post-modernism which respect neither religion nor science. In a style that is accessible to the lay person he begins his book "by going back to the fundamentals: God, the Qur'an and Science and then addresses in detail Darwinian evolution, modern cosmology, the effects of prayer, etc."

Check it out:

*Réconcilier l'Islam et la science moderne - l'esprit d'Averroës, 2008, Paris, Presses de la Renaissance

Home-based enterprises now account for one in 10 US private sector jobs

"New research shows the economic importance of home-based businesses," begins a Businessweek article by John Tozzi in an article titled "The Rise of the 'Hompreneur'". "They account for more than half of all U.S. businesses and employ more people than venture-backed companies...

Here are a few excerpts from the article:

"You can trace the rise of home-based businesses to the early days of telecommuting in the 1980s and the mass adoption of the Internet in the 1990s. Cloud computing, online collaboration, and smartphones have accelerated the trend, and recent research clarifies the economic significance of (home-based) companies...

"We're seeing more and more home-based businesses that are real businesses," says Steve King, who coauthored (a) new report with his wife, Carolyn Ockels. (The couple runs Emergent Research, a small research and consulting shop, from their home in Lafayette, Calif.)

The pair analyzed U.S. Census data and Small Business Administration research, along with data from the Small Business Success Index, a survey of 1,500 companies sponsored by Network Solutions and the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business..."

Read the article:

The Rise of the 'Homepreneur' - BusinessWeek

On Writing, Music and Creativity

A very good article on the above subject by Daniel Johnson can be found in yesterday's web edition of Salem-News.com

"(CALGARY, Alberta) - Most writers take years to become themselves; to transform their preconceived notions, idiosyncrasies, preoccupations, attitudes and mannerisms into a personal style. For Franz Kafka, who was an exception to so many rules of life and literature, it only took a single night.

On Sunday, Sept. 22, 1912, the day after Yom Kippur, the 29-year-old Kafka sat down at his desk and wrote “The Judgment,” his first masterpiece, in one all-night session. “Only in this way can writing be done,” he exulted, “only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul.” Good writers do the same, except generally over a much longer time.

Guy Murchie set out with grandiose and unrealistic expectations. In 1961 he began The Seven Mysteries of Life, thinking it would take two or three years, five or six at the most. It was finally finished in 1978—17 years later. “The pitiable fact is thus revealed that I’ve averaged less than one finished sentence a day during all this time…”

Then there was Will Durant, who began his monumental Story of Civilization in 1929, with the first volume, Our Oriental Heritage, coming out in 1935. The 11th volume, The Age of Napoleon, was published in 1975. Over 46 years, we could say he averaged about half a page—less than 250 words a day..."

Read the rest of the article, that contains a sound piece of advice in the form of a quote from Billy Crystal, "A writer writes, always..."

On Writing, Music and Creativity

The Dyson Fan: was it invented 30 years ago?

The above title heads up an article in today's British Daily Telegraph. Below are three paragraphs from the article:

"The Dyson bladeless fan unveiled last week to great acclaim was first developed 30 years ago by a Japanese company, according to documents filed at the Intellectual Property Office.

...The desktop fan, costing £200, has won plaudits both in Britain and America for its sleek design and clever engineering. The Air Multiplier works by sucking in air at the base, and pushing it out at speed through a thin gap in the fan's ring, meaning there are no visible blades in the fan.

However, documents indicate that a Japanese company, Tokyo Shibaura Electric, developed a nearly identical idea of a bladeless desktop fan in 1981. It is understood it was never manufactured."

Read the article:
Dyson fan: was it invented 30 years ago? - Telegraph

Left: Dyson patent (2009) and right: Tokyo Shibaura patent (1981) Photo: UK INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY OFFICE

There does seem to be a troubling similarity between the two documents (above) shown by the Daily Telegraph.