Don’t feel bad if you struggle with SharePoint

This project was not SharePoint, but I have seen some people try and do this with SharePoint. But you can imagine how much stress this project would have caused to participants.

The South Australian government has pulled the plug on its $5 million records management system project, ending a five-year saga plagued by repeated cost blowouts, delays and confusion

http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,24510560-15306,00.html

I can’t help but feel that if this particularly wise and insightful document written by their federal government counterparts had been written a couple of years earlier, some of sting just might have been taken out of this example of expensive project failure.

Many of the most pressing policy challenges for the APS involve dealing with very complex problems. These problems share a range of characteristics—they go beyond the capacity of any one organisation to understand and respond to, and there is often disagreement about the causes of the problems and the best way to tackle them. These complex policy problems are sometimes called ‘wicked’ problems

Critically, tackling wicked problems also calls for high levels of systems thinking. This big picture thinking helps policy makers to make the connections between the multiple causes and interdependencies of wicked problems that are necessary in order to avoid a narrow approach and the artificial taming of wicked problems

Read the full document here:

http://www.apsc.gov.au/publications07/wickedproblems.htm

10 Comments on “Don’t feel bad if you struggle with SharePoint

  1. As Adam Sandler once noted “Gee, you know that information… really would’ve been more useful to me YESTERDAY!”

    As an occasional Archivist I can appreciate the complexity of RM systems, but the fact is there are usually examples around of people who have done things the right way. Generally businesses can’t afford to spend $5 Million (or 5 years for that matter) on things that don’t work. One wonders if governments ever take the time to look at examples of well managed projects before embarking on this sort of thing.

    I hope the South Australian taxpayers are happy with the nothing they got for $5 Mil.

  2. As an occasional Archivist I can appreciate the complexity of RM systems, but the fact is there are usually examples around of people who have done things the right way. Generally businesses can’t afford to spend $5 Million (or 5 years for that matter) on things that don’t work. One wonders if governments ever take the time to look at examples of well managed projects before embarking on this sort of thing.

  3. Some do – I can attest to it. But the funny thing is I do not find it in IT, as much as I find it within large scale infrasturcture projects like highways or city redevelopments. Command and control style of problem structuring can often be blind to whats obvious to people looking from the outside. With a wicked problem, the harder you try to control it, the more wriggly it gets.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.