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To: Jay who wrote (16778)	2/5/2004 7:41:31 PM
From: Lizzie Tudor	Respond to of 306849

Yes, well my belief was that in the 90s, the weak management in most IT shops was covered up by leagues of IT consultants who made enough money to carry the weight of the poor management. But when work went offshore, voila!, the poor qualifications of IT management is beginning to show itself. Until recently, the downside of "offshoring" wasn't clear. But recently published studies by Forrester Research Inc. (FORR ) and Gartner Inc. (IT ) suggest that the practice shouldn't be undertaken lightly. Gartner says that based on a survey of 219 clients who outsource projects offshore and domestically, it expects half of such projects undertaken in 2003 to fail to deliver anticipated savings. The main cause of problems, according to analysts, is poor project management by the companies shipping work overseas. "It's all about how you monitor," says Dale L. Fuller, CEO of Borland Software Corp. (BORL ) in Scotts Valley, Calif. businessweek.com What this piece calls "monitoring" is really technical knowledge of how IT systems are developed. A project manager for an offshore team needs to know enough about how systems are developed to notice when things are going wrong early on. But most IT project managers are too weak to perform this function, which is really more of a tactical tech lead role vs. traditional management. Fortunately the upcoming Linux shift is going to shake things up again and the focus is on service and support vs. coding. So less offshoring, if any at all.

To: Jay who wrote (16778)	2/5/2004 7:48:35 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 306849

I once trained my project manager in how to use her project management software. After wrestling with it for a couple of weeks, she came back to me to help her to get it to work. It turned out that the software wouldn't let her "fudge" the completion times of all the parts of the project, shooting her drop dead date past when the company wanted it completed. She ended up not using it. <G> This same person overloaded me with tasks, so I went to her to get her to prioritize about ten jobs, hoping she'd get me some help. She went through the list, saying "This is a one, and this is a one..."