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Authored by: tknarr on Sunday, January 20 2013 @ 04:32 PM EST |
A lot of the expense of "enterprise" software is overhead. Managers to manage
the managers who manage the developers. Analysts to sit between the developers
and the people who know what the system needs to do. Project managers to manage
schedules. Processes whose sole purpose is to slow down development and prevent
the system from being changed to match user requirements. And none of that
contributes to actually producing the software. With a project like this I
expect the district's not going to bother with all that overhead, so if they get
some decent developers who're interested in turning out a working product
they'll have no problem getting it done better and faster than an
"enterprise-class" project could, and for a lot less money.
Yes, I've
worked on exactly that kind of "enterprise-grade" project, and boggled managers
by taking a problem that's been bouncing around unresolved for months and
solving it in 2 days by the simple expedient of throwing out the PMs and
analysts and getting the users and the developers on the phone together. The
users explained what they wanted, the devs went "Oh yeah, that's easy enough.
Let's write that up and do it.". Next day we had a neatly-written comprehensive
description that the users agreed exactly described what they needed and the
devs agreed laid out everything they needed to implement it. The only "problem"
being that it was a nice type-written document not in the Project Management
Office's mandatory format, and I resolved that by handing the PM who brought up
the problem an action item: rewrite the document in the required format and
submit it for review by afternoon next. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, January 27 2013 @ 04:15 AM EST |
The B.C. government has identified 16 companies
that it says have
the expertise to create a new student
information system to replace the
unpopular and expensive BC
enterprise Student Information System
(BCeSIS).
If interested, those companies have until Feb. 14 to submit
bids,
but the [.PDF]
Request for Proposals says they will
have to prove their financial
strength. Proponents should
have a minimum of either $100 million in
annual revenues or
$10 million annual net income in each of the last three
years, it states.
That probably lets out little Saanich school district,
which
has developed software that district officials say can do
the job for
cheap.
Janet Steffenhagen, Vancouver Sun[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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