Dr. Dobb's Journal - December 2007 - (Page 61)

d12ambler_p4ma 10/15/07 8:30 AM Page 61 find that they gave significantly different answers to several questions, particularly when it came to issues surrounding schedule, money (resources), and quality. Table 2 compares their responses with those of other constituents including the average. To be fair only 18 business stakeholders responded—statistically, those figures are on shaky ground (so take them with a grain of salt). It appears that project managers are more interested in delivering on time and on budget than delivering when the system is ready. This may be because of the reward structure in place within the IT organization, although if that was the case, I would expect the numbers to be closer aligned with those of IT managers (and with nonmanagement IT staff for that matter). It may also be the result of different values with the project management community, values that are often driven by the Project Management Institute (PMI)’s Book of Knowledge (www.pmi.org). More research into this divide is definitely warranted. People’s attitude towards a healthy workplace is a serious problem. Although 75.8 percent said that having a healthy workplace is more important than delivering on time and on budget, only 53.3 percent of business stakeholders surveyed said so. I’m happy to say that 80 percent of IT managers and 70.3 percent of project managers put the needs of their staff over being on time and budget, but I’m definitely worried about the business attitudes towards IT staff. This may be indicative of the frustration that business stakeholders often have with IT in general as well as a common belief that IT services are becoming a commodity. Until these figures get closer to 100 percent, I think we have a problem. Survey Respondents The survey was announced on the Dr. Dobb’s Report newsletter the last week of August 2007, ran for the entire week, and received 586 responses. As usual, the respondents were fairly senior and they worked for a range of organization size: • • • • • 73% had 10 or more years of experience in IT 69% were North American 18% were European 84% worked for commercial/private firms 16% worked for government agencies People’s positions were varied, although the majority (53.8 percent) indicated that they were developer/modelers. The number of respondents by position: • • Business stakeholder: 18 NonManagement IT(below) • Data professional: 22 • Developer/modeler: 315 • Operations/Support: 10 QA/Test: 17 IT Manager: 68 Project Manager: 105 Other: 31 —S.W.A. Figure 1: Project success rate by project type and organization type. • • • • Get data right AddressObject API Prevent errors before they occur to ensure the integrity of your database. Use AddressObject API to verify, cleanse and format customer data at the point of entry or in batch. Address Object easily integrates with Perl, PHP Java and .NET. , - offering a better way to build-in data validation. right from the start Get a FREE demo at: MelissaData.com/dobbs 1.800.MELISSA December 2007 l www.ddj.com l Dr. Dobb’s Journal 61 http://www.pmi.org http://www.imagix.com http://MelissaData.com/dobbs http://MelissaData.com/dobbs http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - December 2007

Dr. Dobb's Journal - December 2007 Contents Hmmmm Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer’s Notebook Computer Books: Reading Between the Lines Conversations Query Anything with SQLite XQuery Web Maps with the Google Map API OpenALM and Its Manifesto Transactional Programming Effective Concurrency The Agile Edge Swaine’s Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - December 2007

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