Confessions of an IT Manager_Phil Factor

106 Secrets of successful IT projects
left with one of the scariest and most opaque bits of application code I had ever
come across in my waking hours. To make matters worse, the business
sponsors were baying for impossible improvements, bug fixes and extensions
to the scope of the project.
Reward results
The idea of rewarding a programmer's productivity may seem unfair and
unreasonable in a dignified profession. On the contrary, it is as difficult for
programmers to gauge their own productivity as it is for them to test their code,
and a monetary reward sends a clear signal of a job well done.
There is always one programmer on a team who works hard and does heroic
coding, but achieves very little. The objective of producing an application that
satisfies the business requirement is lost in the abstractions and obfuscations of
the code.
It is as if they get sucked into a Tolkien-esque universe. There have been
times when I've half expected to go to work and see nothing but a pair of feet
sticking out of the screen. Now that physical violence against programmers is
frowned upon, one way to jolt them back to reality is to be selective but
generous in the distribution of bonuses.
Been there, done that
Unless it is thought that I speak with the sanctimony of virtue, I must
confess that over the years I have either watched or participated in almost every
mistake that can be made in IT. One of my worst experiences occurred when
the company I worked for got a contract with a government department
embedded deep within what was then called the Ministry of Agriculture.
Our sales rep got overexcited after a meeting with government officials and
priced out the job as a trivial application involving the automated sorting and
grading of vegetables with its associated simple accounting. Instead, it turned
into a monster application that was to be released nationwide as a major
government initiative.
The scope of the project grew faster than the development work could be
completed. Interfaces and dependencies grew like field mushrooms. To make
matters worse, the hardware, selected by government dictat, was unreliable, and
the macros used for process control were almost impossible to debug. The
software, a version of BASIC, was proprietary to the hardware and innocent of
database functionality.
The day of the demonstration loomed. The government mandarins and
representatives of the farming community were soon scheduled to come and
admire the efficiency with which the application could read barcodes; grade,