Customer Reviews

A Hero Behind Every Tree - The Non-Technical Reasons Your IT Investments Fail.

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I live and work in IT. I've done so for 30 years. And I've seen MORE than my share of projects that either fail or don't live up to their original expectations. Why is that? Steve Caudill and Russell Mullen look at the reasons for this in their book A Hero Behind Every Tree - The Non-Technical Reasons Your IT Investments Fail. This book is chock full of wisdom and experience that they've gained in their time working for a vast array of different companies and organizations. You would do well to learn from them and avoid making the same mistakes yourselves.

Contents:
Introduction; Hero Syndrome; Our Tools; Our Top-Ten Issues; Believing the Hype; Solving the Wrong Problem; Using the Wrong People; Measuring the Wrong Things; Hope as a Risk-Management Strategy; Round Is a Shape (Not Keeping Fit); Ignorance as a Defense; Ostrichism (Ignoring Complexity); Giving Perception Sway (Not Communicating Reality); A Hero Behind Every Tree; Taking Action; Appendix; Bibliography; About the Authors

The title of the book is a play on the general feeling that all IT departments need heros who are willing to sacrifice nearly everything to pull off a miracle. There's a good chance you've been a hero a time or two during your career. But Caudill and Mullen contend that needing a hero on an IT project means you've failed. A hero is needed when the original plan is in disarray, there's no chance of making the project deadline, and all "normal" work efforts have failed. It's true that IT tends to attract those who can play the hero role quite well, but as a regular business practice, heroic efforts are not a good sign.

Caudill and Mullen go on to cover a number of reasons why projects fail, mainly from the people and business perspective. For instance, you may get marching orders from some higher-up who says they want to start happening. IT runs off and figures out how to build or improve the system to do that. But when it comes time to demo, the project sponsor is still unhappy. Generally this is repeated a couple more times before someone comes up with the bright idea to sit down with the sponsor and ask them what they are REALLY trying to accomplish. Turns out there was a gap of misunderstanding between what they asked for (and what IT heard and did) and what they want to achieve. Knowing these situations exist and planning for them up-front means you can cut directly to the chase and cut out the need for a hero to step in and bail out the project at the last moment. The authors also share a number of tools they've used over the years to help you avoid the problems they reference. Risk-matrix charts, low-fidelity prototyping, and peer reviews are just a few of these. Nothing hard, nothing complex... Just a solid, concrete way of trying to avoid that call for the hero in the bottom of the 9th inning when it looks like all is lost...

A Hero Behind Every Tree - The Non-Technical Reasons Your IT Investments Fail is a book that may well change the way you look at the IT department (and probably yourself) when it comes to projects. You could very well find that you start to deliver on projects without the need for a hero. And while it won't necessarily have that air of the dramatic when it comes time to move it into production, it'll do wonders for maintaining your work/life balance.

Russell and Steve are veterans and have the scars and stories to prove it. From large and audacious to small and "well-scoped", this book tells the tales we've all seen, heard about or watched in slow motion of projects gone awry. More than just battle stories, the authors dig in to analyze why the projects failed and explain how to avoid that type of failure in the future with practical, no-nonsense advice. Read it and then buy your executive team members all a copy to help your company avoid costly failures and wasted time.