Notes

The Future of Project Management
Events of the final decade have changed the face of project management and as the environment in which projects end up in changes; project management will need to change to keep pace. Project managers who can accurately forecast demands for change and alter their plans to support them will have an edge over those that don't. Before we gaze into the crystal ball, let's have a look at the influences that have set project management on the current course.

THE FANTASTIC Y2K Scam

Rightly or wrongly, the IT world lost plenty of credibility when everyone turned their calendars forward to the year 2000. There have been undoubtedly systems and applications on the market that did require modification to support the new millennium however the amount of money spent on Y2K programs cannot be justified by the changes that were made. Every IT organization had some form of Y2K program or other. Those organizations which were not large enough to afford an in-house program engaged consultants.

Every line of code atlanta divorce attorneys application and every data record in every database was reviewed for "compliancy". This despite the fact that every commercially available system at that time recorded dates with a 4 character year format. Undoubtedly there were some applications and data tables which used a 2 digit field to hold year data. The original reason for using a 2 character field to record these details was the punch card and the expense of memory. 30 or 40 years prior to the year 2000 the extra effort to punch 2 more characters onto a data card and the cost of the extra memory the 4 character field would incur were a consideration. Anyone in the 80's and 90's creating new date fields should not have used a 2 character field and anyone upgrading a credit card applicatoin or database should have converted the two 2 character field to a 4 character field. Those applications and databases which didn't use the 4 character field were few in number but large, expensive, Y2K programs were spawned nonetheless.

The impact on the general public was a lot more ridiculous. Huge amount of money were spent on stocking up on everything from cashews to cash because of a perception which come January 1, 2000 no check out or ATM works. Individuals were so spooked they stocked their cellars with water and food on a scale not seen since the bomb shelters of the cold war.

When corporations discovered that they had spent all that money on an application which found and corrected a small number of problems they begun to ask pointed questions concerning the ROI of this program. The result was a more cynical approach to Information Technology, programs, and projects generally. This was compounded by the feeling among the public that they have been bamboozled by technology and had spent all that money on emergency supplies and then end up being the butt of a giant joke. Project managers found themselves operating within an environment of a lot less trust as a result.
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