I have been off to the States and Canada for the past month hence no blog entries, that’s not to say I have not been doing my usual when I am on a long flight, thinking about past projects or companies that I can extract some lessons learned from.
One such company under financial pressure had blended project activity with operational activity and I am not sure to this day that they felt this was a bad move. I do and here is why:
There are always a few rotten eggs but generally most IT professional try to do a good role, they are however driven and motivated in different ways. A project team should ideally be focused on quality, cost and time in that order. An operational team are almost always driven by time first so a person trying to do both roles is in conflict.
The other problem in my view is the need for tight Front Door procedures, that is to say Operations should enforce that the project team should use the time they are afforded to make sure they do a quality handover. If the team are mixed you don’t often handover to yourself.