Category Archives: Communication

Communication with specialists, or how to recognize a good manager

Working in IT means working with specialists. The IT world is one with a large amount of specializations (technical, methodological, business-wise), that is still growing every day. The same can be said of many other lines of business and it is even true for non-business area’s like science: it’s a scientist’s job to know a lot about very little. Apparently, the world needs specialists. I would even take it one step further: specialization is probably inherent to economic activity. Every…
Read more…

Top 3 mistakes made by IT clients

In previous posts, I explained why software development is complicated and susceptible to errors. Subsequently, I tried to find out out why especially large governmental IT projects fail. In this article, I point my arrows towards the clients of IT. It’s my opinion that a lot of problems in IT projects start at the client side. Clients are usually very passionate about their own business (not being IT), have all kinds of ideas about how IT should support their business,…
Read more…

Why software development compares to building a house

Most of my clients, when discussing software development, they justify themselves by telling me that they don’t understand much about it. I always respond that, in order for their software development projects to be successful, they have to understand some basic concepts at least. However, they’re usually not very motivated to learn about software development. “Not my piece of cake”, “I just want to use the software, not understand it”, “Too complicated for me”, or even “It doesn’t interest me”….
Read more…