S3 Ep3: 2022 PMI Global Summit Presentation - The Biggest Constraint in IT Projects is the Human Brain Artwork

Bridging Business & IT

Meet your hosts, Dave and Dan, a father and son team interviewing experts from around the IT ecosystem. Dave’s a serial entrepreneur, CIO, board member, author, speaker and advisor with a lifetime of frontline tech industry experience. He wants things to work—perfectly! His son and cohost Dan, is Head of Sales for PlanetScale (a Silicon Valley software company). He wants to get things done—now! While they certainly have their differences, they’re both driven to understand what business customers need so they can deliver the best possible solution. That’s why these two have joined forces (along with a lot of industry heavyweights) to help resolve the biggest challenge in business technology: How to successfully bridge the gap between what a business needs and how its IT department and vendors address that need. This podcast is for those in the trenches, for professionals with hands-on experience who are striving to overcome the multitude of challenges standing between them and the successful deployment of technology to advance business objectives. Each episode is filled not only with humor and sarcasm, but with tricks of the trade and lessons learned. Connect with their stories, experiences, shortcomings, failures, and successes. Let them be your guide on this unvarnished, irreverent and entertaining look at business and IT. Subscribe, listen, and laugh while getting a true appreciation for the fact that in your day to day tech challenges, you’re not alone and solutions are out there.

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Bridging Business & IT

S3 Ep3: 2022 PMI Global Summit Presentation - The Biggest Constraint in IT Projects is the Human Brain

February 01, 2023 • Dave Burrill & Dan Burrill • Season 3 • Episode 3

In December, 2022 the Project Management Institute held their Global Summit Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada . Of the more than 250 talks and break out sessions, about 10% were featured live. These were selected to showcase the most important issues in project management. As fate would have it, Dave was asked to give one of those live talks.

It's widely known that IT projects fail at an alarming rate. What's not widely known is that the cause of 75% of those failures is our inability to communicate. What's even less well known is that the cause of that inability is the human brain. This presentation explains how and why our brain sabotages our communications, and offers a simple way to fix that problem.

The title of the Dave's presentation was "The Human Brain: The IT Kiting Constraint We Never Consider". Obviously this is a topic we've talked a lot about on this podcast. Given the response of the 300+ people in attendance, we're going to be talking about it a lot more. It was great to give this talk because it was so nice to be able to interact with a live audience again and get their reactions. We wondered when we started to explore the chasm between business and IT three years ago whether the problem was really that bad. After watching 300 heads nod up and down in agreement for an hour and getting to talk to so many great people afterwards, it's clear this is an issue we must deal with.

I hope you enjoy the recording. Here's some select references if you're interested:

Charette, Robert, (2014) Why Software Fails - We waste billions of dollars each year on entirely preventable mistakes, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Spectrum magazine

Eagleman, David (2011) Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, Random House

Gawande, Atul (2009) The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, Picador

Hawkins, Jeff (2021) A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence, Hachette Book Group

Kahneman, Daniel (2011) Thinking Fast & Slow, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux

Kapur, Narinder editor, (2011) The Paradoxical Brain, (Dror, Itiel E. The paradox of human expertise: why experts get it wrong) Cambridge University Press

Krasner, Herb, (2021) The Cost of Poor Software Quality in the US: A 2020 Report, Consortium for Information & Software Quality

McKinsey & Company and the BT Centre for Major Programme Management at Oxford University, (2012, 2020), Delivering large-scale IT projects on time, on budget and on value,

Sapolsky, Robert (2017) Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Penguin Books

Standish Group, (2020) Standish Group Annual CHAOS 2020 Report, StandishGroup.com

These podcasts are dedicated to bridging the gap between business & IT. Each episode looks at different aspects of this relationship as we explore ways to help the two groups better communicate. We're passionate about this topic because it's a failure to communicate that causes 75% of all IT project failures and costs the US $1.8 Trillion every year—8% of US GDP!

If you don't want to become one of these statistics and want to learn about an easy way to avoid it, please visit our website and schedule a free consultation.

Alternatively, if there's some topic you'd like to hear more about, or you have an idea about how we might better serve our listeners, please shoot us an email at dave@bridgingbusinessit.com. We'd love to hear from you.

http://bridgingbusinessit.com

People on this episode

Dan Burrill

Host

Dave Burrill

Host