Learning from the sewers

The Fowl Meadow todayThe basic stages of building infrastructure--plan, design, build, and maintain--apply equally well to information systems and physical infrastructure like pipes, roads, and power systems. Over the years, the science of project management has developed many tools to help such projects stay on schedule and on budget, yet many projects fail to their timelines and their financial milestones. Why a project fails is often viewed as a sui generis combination of internal management and technical glitches and external forces. But there is often one common factor: A failure of the organization's leadership to adopt a supervisory approach that helps keep the project on track. Oddly enough, this can occur even when the leader of the organization is strongly committed to its success.If you read through the Washington Post's summary of the path taken to construct the federal health care insurance exchange system, you can find lots of explanations for the project's failure.  Some are internal to the agencies involved, while others may have derived from intense political opposition or fear of that opposition.  Nonetheless, it seems incredible that such could have occurred when the President's commitment to the program was unquestioned, and when the stakes were so high for him personally and for the country.I'd like to suggest that one reason was that the President simply did not understand how to supervise this kind of project in a manner that would identify im...
Source: Running a hospital - Category: Health Managers Source Type: blogs