A VALUABLE LESSON

Many years ago I learned a valuable lesson, which is as true today as it was then.

At the time I was employed as an IT specialist by an Australian Government department. The CIO was very concerned that his project managers were not performing well, and he was looking for ways to improve their performance.

After a good deal of thought and consultation, our senior management decided that the solution to the problem was to adopt a very powerful - and very expensive -project management software package which would keep track of everything they did. Since these were the days of the mainframe, the licence was certainly not cheap (in excess of $150,000, as I recollect), but the CIO considered that it was money well spent if he could get his project managers to perform better as a result.

The licence was obtained, the package installed, and all the project managers were given extensive training on how to use the new system. It was then introduced to the organisation with a fanfare.

And the result? The project management didn't improve at all; if anything , it actually got a little worse!

The problem was that the project managers themselves weren't performing well. Instead of calling them to account, the senior management were trying to use a computer system to paper over the cracks, and it simply didn't work.

The moral of this story is loud and clear: a computer system in itself will never perform well if the people using it are not themselves performing well. Computer systems support people, they can never replace them, and the systems are only ever as good as the people they support.

And yes, the message is as tue today as it was then....