Hi all

Welcome to the 7th post on this series delving into the murky depths of SharePoint project failure. I’m sure that even if you haven’t used SharePoint, or been involved in a SharePoint project, most will have experiences of being sore and sorry from a project gone bad and the content presented in this series thus far has been somewhat familiar.

Speaking of sore and sorry, I am writing this post days after buying the kids a Nintendo Wii. I’m not a geek-toy kind of guy, so I’m usually a little behind when it comes to consumer gadgets, but what a brilliant product it is. I am completely addicted to Wii Sports (especially the tennis and baseball), but after two days, I am feeling muscle ache like I have never felt before. I can barely move!

So I’d better stop playing that damn game and get back to business. In the unlikely event that you are hitting article seven for the first time, I suggest you go back and read this series from the start. You will learn all about tequila slammers, why Microsoft is like Britney Spears, Bill Gates selling SharePoint to Sergei Brin and the wonderful land of chocolate where projects never fail.

More recently, we targeted the infrastructure and development geeks in posts five and six. Now it’s time to cast our lens over the guys who control the budgets and get paid way more than you and I. So of course it is the project sponsor and senior management in general

Continue reading “Why do SharePoint Projects Fail? - Part 7″

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This post is going a little off-track from the previous 5 posts around SharePoint project failure and I promise I will get back on track again soon. I felt that I had to talk about this topic while we are looking at the nature of project failure, wicked problems and SharePoint. Not sure if it is really a part 6 so I have made a new, separate interlude in between the project failure series. Why don’t you let me know, reader, if you think this belongs as a part of the “project failure” series!

My wife is studying a business course at university and I have been reading some of her reference books. One book was particularly good and really got me thinking about technology’s contribution to global organisations and how at this scale, most problems likely have a large degree of wickedness.

This edited book is called Global Strategies: Insights from the World’s Leading Thinkers (The Harvard Business Review Book Series), and it is well worth reading - even for you technical geeks.

What it does is look at the strategy, and execution of strategy, that has led some organisations to make the transition from regional to global success story at the expense of their competitors. We are talking corporations with tens of thousands of employees here too, and the CEO perspective really hits home to you - the sheer *mammoth scale* of it all.

Trying to change a culture at an organisation of 20 employees can be an insurmountable challenge. Try 45,000 employees across 15 subsidiaries in 10 different countries. (Makes a SharePoint rollout seem like a walk in the park.)

Continue reading “Globalisation, Strategy, Technology and Organisational Maturity”

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