My colleague Alistair Knock(@aknock) came up with the characterisation of an IT Project below after a recent discussion about enterprise collaboration software, which I reproduce here with permission.
Stages of a IT project as a river
- spring: random optimistic thoughts circulate online, IM, watercooler, pub. The words ‘wouldn’t it be nice if’ are repeated over and over again, and a diagram emerges. The guy with the Guinness already has a database schema designed.
- stream: a space is created on online and someone, who will later regret it, offers to set up a test system. Happy people promote it internally by setting up blogs and intentionally spam all the mailing lists but still apologise for cross-posting (I am convinced this self-referential act creates a small amount of dark matter).
- river: lots of friendly people start using the BETA NO GUARANTEES BETA system, love it, and start breaking all sorts of policies, many of which are rewritten as a result. Someone tries to put everything into Microsoft Project and consequently goes on sick leave.
- waterfall: major panic and lots of talk about scalability. General anger from management and calls for a review/subgroup. Minutes are circulated in Word and there is great confusion about which version is current. Two people miss the meeting because their diary doesn’t support meeting requests.
- pool: general calm and lots of hard work crafting documentation which is published on a wiki. The wiki begins to be abused as people try to make it do the things that the original project was supposed to do, including but not limited to booking train tickets.
- evaporated pool: documentation is now hopelessly out of date and system is close to collapse due to near constant use by 3 users. Rest of users have split into one segment who are using some new Google invention and continue to breach policies; the rest are very optimistic about an open-source product but have yet to get it to compile and/or have grave and insurmountable concerns about it being distributed under BSD rather than GPL.
- cloud: yeah, right.
