Comments on: Why do SharePoint Projects Fail? – Part 8

By: Adam Wright

Adam Wright — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 04:08:48 +0000

Paul, all I can say is wow. Great series!!! I was actually searching for some entertaining reading on “SharePoint Horror Stories” and ended up finding your series. This series is full of points of wisdom and excellent links to other relevant and as intriguing articles. I can definitely say this series will be one I reference frequently in the future when dealing with wicked problems. I will probably also point some managers and stakeholders to pieces of this series in order to try to help educate them about how essential the roles they play are in projects. Please let me know if you do or have put this out as a white paper. I believe that would be priceless. Once again fantastic work.

By: KirstennU28

KirstennU28 — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 20:14:13 +0000

Do you present the freelance writing ? Your information connecting to this topic seems to be smashing.

By: The One Best Practice to Rule Them All: Part 3 | End User SharePoint

The One Best Practice to Rule Them All: Part 3 | End User SharePoint — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 14:46:51 +0000

[...] has been around since… forever. I wrote in more detail about the perils of waterfall in the project fail series in the section "how we really solve [...]

By: Ray

Ray — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 21:47:48 +0000

Paul – I ran across this series and read the entire posting, 1 to 8, this afternoon. Very insightful and thought provoking. I am in the early planning phases of a SharePoint implementation and will put the info in this series to good use.
Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts and experience.

By: admin

admin — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 01:34:31 +0000

Kailash, I am a big fan of your blog and your writings, so your feedback is immensely gratifying.

By: Kailash Awati

Kailash Awati — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 01:27:26 +0000

Paul, I printed out the entire series to read over the weekend. Just finished reading through, and all I can say is, "I wish I'd written it myself." Thanks for a brilliant analysis of why projects fail. As I'm sure you're aware, the difficulty of achieving a shared understanding in software projects was also highlighted by Brooks in his classic article, No Silver Bullet. A quote from the paper is particularly apposite: "...I believe the hard part of building software to be the specification, design, and testing of this conceptual construct, not the labor of representing it and testing the fidelity of the representation. We still make syntax errors, to be sure; but they are fuzz compared with the conceptual errors in most systems. If this is true, building software will always be hard. There is inherently no silver bullet..." Brooks mentions four inherent, irreducible properties of software systems: complexity, conformity, changeability and invisibility. A while ago I wrote a piece entitled, On the intrinsic complexity of IT projects, wherein I discuss the connections between Brooks' analysis of the software systems and technical project management. Thanks again for your entertaining and edifying analysis of why projects fail - links to the series will be forwarded to friends and colleagues shortly. Regards, Kailash.

By: CleverWorkarounds » The one best practice to rule them all - Part 1

CleverWorkarounds » The one best practice to rule them all - Part 1 — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 21:25:59 +0000

[...] and in fact, most *encourage* you to take the bits that make logical sense for you. As I wrote in Part 8 of the "SharePoint Project Failure…" series, I found it ironic that implementation [...]

By: Stuart

Stuart — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 07:41:31 +0000

I am in the unenviable position of trying to foster a more mature approach to support for our organisation. We already use Sharepoint in a very limited capacity as an intranet portal, and some thought was going towards turning it into an all singing all dancing toy.
After reading all this, I am content to use it as a very simple document repository to start with. It can do ONE thing well for now, and when I know how it performs for that, I will integrate the others. Stably.

By: Ron Turnbull

Ron Turnbull — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 12:25:23 +0000

Spot on. I read the entire set of articles from start to finish. Interesting, enlightening and entertaining. Can’t wait to recommend this to our SharePoint team!

By: admin

admin — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 02:57:09 +0000

Thanks Chris, I actually own that book – suprised?

Definitely check out Conklin’s stuff, its complimentary yet has little to do with agile as a methodology. His theme is that shared understanding is the root of it all, Agile (and Scrum obviously) happens to have techniques within it that facilitate shared understanding, but there is still a lot of process there and therefore people can get fixated on whether they are following the process right, as opposed to getting everyone on the same page whatever the means…