Book Review : Why new systems fail

While I am not involved in the specific field, I found the book “Why New Systems Fail: Theory and Practice Collide” educational.

This brief text is written in a casual style that makes it easy to read, while at the same time seeming less “professional” and less likely to be taken seriously by senior executives in corporations that might be about to make the mistakes the author, Phil Simon, clearly identifies.  But he does identify a lot of completely valid reasons why new enterprise software implementations are not the successes that are hoped for when they are begun.

However, based on my experience in the engineering and construction business, where we execute large, complex projects, many of the lessons are transferable (and in fact seem strangely familiar).  Failure to plan effectively, failure to consider that things will not go perfectly, failure to schedule with some slack or float to allow for recovery should things go off the rails during one stage or another.

Additional flags are about not selecting consultants or providers based solely on the apparently up-front cost – the idea of you get what you pay for appears to be as true in enterprise software as it is in heavy construction.

Having also spent some of my career trying to develop, implement and support data management software for engineering (not exactly enterprise class) and discovering that we had all the same problems – significant underestimation of the resources it would take to accomplish the task, failure to ask enough questions of the commercial-off-the-shelf software vendor about what the product could and couldn’t actually do (or how much customization it might take), and failure to sufficiently understand the problem we were trying to solve – which resulted in what Mr. Simon would call either a “Big Failure” or and “Unmitigated Disaster”.

Anywho – if you are interested in enterprise (or other) software development and implementation, or any manner of project execution – this is a good read.