[freehunter]

The last big project failure I had was due to the company selecting the right technology for the problem, but the wrong one for the company culture. The company's engineers were young and viewed themselves as a startup, which means they like to use bleeding-edge solutions. The company themselves were an old enterprise with well-worn problems, and picked exactly the technology they should have. Unfortunately a newer, sexier product was part of the selection process, and the engineering staff didn't like that management picked the "wrong" one. They stonewalled the project until it failed, management complained about how inflexible the product was, and they switched to the other, newer, sexier product (I work for a vendor-agnostic consulting organization, so I stayed on for both products) and we ended up developing custom solutions for every problem we encountered with the new sexy product. Solutions that were solved out of the box with the older and more mature product.

It was $110m down the drain on the first product, then another $80m to purchase the second, plus the cost of my consulting time to create custom solutions.

People and politics are the hardest part of any technology implementation. Any article I see blaming SAP, IBM, Oracle, HP, etc of botching a multi-million dollar public project, I always have to wonder: who went wrong... not what went wrong.

[dragonwriter]

> The last big project failure I had was due to the company selecting the right technology for the problem, but the wrong one for the company culture.

The company culture is a central piece of any business problem you are addressing, if your solution doesn't address it, it isn't addressing the actual problem, but at best a lower-dimensional projection.

[derefr]

Usually there’s no interface to addressing such problems.

Interacting with the cultures of some companies is like trying to treat the mental illness of someone in a dissociative fugue state. You might have a solution that fits how things are on the inside—but how are you going to even get through to them to communicate that, when they can’t hear or see you and are instead lost in their own little world?

[dragonwriter]

> Usually there’s no interface to addressing such problem

I think you mean correcting culture to some preferred ideal, and that's likely true.

But what I'm saying is that institutional culture is a factor of every problem facing the institution, whether is a thing to fix as part of the solution or a constraint on viable solutions.

[cerberusss]

> It was $110m down the drain on the first product

What happened afterwards? Did this trigger management to consider why the purchase was the wrong one? I.e. was it a $110m lesson? Or was it really wasted money?

[freehunter]

The $110m spent on the first product was the cost of the product plus the consultant time to implement it. Both of those were sunk at that point and could not be refunded. The decision was made that Product A was not working for the company's needs, and listening to the engineers, the executives decided to switch to Product B. The blame went to Product A and the company that makes Product A, because it's pretty fashionable to hate them right now. "The product is outdated, it's inflexible, it's not able to be customized" and so on. Product B was brought it and it's so much more flexible since it includes absolutely nothing out of the box, so more money was spent on custom development to build the batteries that Product A includes by default.

My company did cut a deal on the consulting for Product B since we had already been working for them on Product A, but the products were charged at full price and to my knowledge none of the cost of Product A was returned to the customer.

As far as management was concerned, Product A was a failure because it was old and inflexible. Management was super happy to see every screen of Product B with their logo on it, which we put on there because we had to develop those screens from scratch anyway. Product B didn't have their logo in the upper right corner, it only had their logo on the printed output.

The only lesson learned was "ask your engineers what product they recommend", which I guess is an important lesson regardless.

[cerberusss]

Thanks, extremely insightful. I've never worked on projects worth more than, say, 5 million euros so these 100+m projects have a sense of scale that's hard to comprehend.

[orlovs]

Each problem have got name and surname