I predicted this 18 months ago....but today at a tech conference in China, Microsoft has announced that its new Windows 10 Operating System will be free to anyone using Windows 7 or later.  Previous articles mentioned that Windows 10 was floating the idea of a subscription service, but 18 months ago, Apple announced that they were doing away with the pay-for-operating-system structure, and Microsoft is wise to follow suit.  

 Last quarter Microsoft’s revenue from consumer licensing accounted for only 16 percent of the company revenue, down from 23 percent the previous year. With Apple and Google Chromebooks slowly eating into Microsoft’s market share, a non-paying customer is better than no customer at all.


As I mused earlier, the business world, for the most part, runs on Microsoft Office.  It's a smart move for Apple; it would be equally so for Microsoft. 

The General Accounting Office (GAO) has issued a report detailing the failures of the healthcare.gov website, and the findings are astounding - starting with the billion (yes, with a B) dollar price tag. Regardless of your thoughts about the policy, the report provides some great lessons learned for IT Project Managers.

The biggest culprits that the GAO study identifies are ineffective planning, ineffective oversight, and ineffective contract management.  I've written about this to some degree before, when a study completed 9 months prior to the website's rollout identified numerous issues that weren't resolved. The GAO study dives a bit deeper into these issues.  

CMS, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, undertook the website development project.  They incurred significant cost increases, schedule slips, and delayed system functionality due primarily to changing requirements that were exacerbated by oversight gaps.

The study concludes that the efforts by CMS were plagued by undefined requirements, the absence of a required acquisition strategy, confusion in contract administration responsibilities, and ineffective use of oversight tools. In addition, CMS did not adhere to the governance model designed for the process, resulting in design and readiness reviews being diminished in importance, delayed, or skipped entirely. By combining that governance model with a new IT development approach the agency had not tried before, CMS added even more uncertainty and potential risk to their process. The result was that problems were not discovered until late, and only after costs had grown significantly.

What does this mean for you?  Well, besides having to pay the price for ineffective project management, it also provides a lessons-learned opportunity when pursuing your own IT projects. If you have any hesitation on launching your new IT projects, it pays to have experienced professionals guide you on the front end as opposed to suffering a public meltdown and significant cost overruns on the tail end.  

If you have an IT Project on the horizon, Paintrock Consulting can help you manage that project effectively and efficiently.  From helping you shape your scope requirements into information that is logical to developers, to determining which project management methodology is best for your goals, to implementing and managing your project and helping you secure additional short-term resources that can come together to help your organization reach its goals - let us help!

How connected is IT within your Business?  I mean more than connected...to the internet.  A new Forrester Research survey commissioned by Effective UI (User Interface) finds that approximately 39% of the IT Executives polled believe that their internal IT organizations deliver projects on time, and on budget.  

Think about that for a minute.  Thirty-nine percent of anything, for most people, would represent failure. Let me illustrate that another way: 

The eye-opening part of the above statement is that this is considered pretty normal.  Other studies peg that success rate at closer to 30%.  Several reasons are cited for this, and I can second many of them from my own experience.  

Notably, larger companies have a lack of Business and IT alignment internally.  This creates an us-versus-them mentality, particularly when budget dollars are closely held.  It creates walled little cube-lands where information is hoarded rather than shared, and self-preservation ranks higher than collaboration.  

Drilling deeper into some of the issues are continuously changing requirements midstream (this is where Agile or Waterfall IT Project Management techniques can help), overburdened in-house IT organizations, and lack of big-picture project management skills or experience in house for IT projects.  

Paintrock Consulting Services can help you beat that paltry 39% success rate across the industry, because we allow you to focus on your core business.  We work with stakeholders at each level of your organization to help shape your IT project.  We can manage a portion or an entire IT project, including development and testing process, security, collaboration platforms, cloud services, coordinating local and offshore teams, new technology deployments, communication and training planning, and stakeholder engagement.  

This work should be done in alignment with your business's goals and objectives, using your brand and voice for consistency to communicate your changes, and in collaboration with - not in opposition to - your existing departments.  

I'm proud to announce that I was voted as one of Hyattville Community Center's new Board Members recently, while out of town!  My first order of duty was to migrate our outdated and unused website.  It had been hosted as a free community service by a company that was decommissioning the option, and the platform used to create it ceased being supported by its maker in 2003.  

It also had to meet the following specifications; the first and most important of which was FREE hosting.  This was difficult, but we landed on Blogger (over Wordpress, for a variety of reasons). Once that was decided, the community desired the following - which required notable customization due to the platform.  That included some of the following:

• Addition of page / tabs at top
  
• Free email
• Free cloud / community access to documents
  
• Free online reservation for the community center
  
• Free online calendar of events
  
• Ease of navigation
  
• Customizing the blog platform to function more like a landing page with recent and archived information
  
• An easy way to contact the Board
• Responsive design, particularly for iPad readers
  
• Commenting option on articles / blog posts
• Linking and/or integration with a Facebook page (also a new mini project)

The new site meets those requirements, and I'm happy to report that the Community is pleased with the deliverable. 

Apple has just ended the era of Paid Operating Systems!!  I was just discussing this as a business model last week... will Microsoft follow suit?  It would be in their best interest to do so.  They have plenty of other revenue makers in their ecosystem, both consumer and enterprise.  And, the business world, for the most part, runs on Microsoft Office.  It's a smart move for Apple; it would be equally wise for Microsoft.