says Tim Seedy at Forrester.
I disagree.
After decades and hundreds of thousands of projects, systems integrators and outsourcers continue to have way too many failures. They do not publicly share those failure statistics. Show me another $ 500 billion a year industry which gets away with close to zero regulatory oversight. They do not even have a trade group which allows for self-policing.
If they manufactured cars, we would not have ABS, air bags, crumple zones or other safety innovations. They would just continue to blame stupid drivers.
If they ran the NTSB, they could conduct an airline crash investigation in a week, and just blame the stupid pilot . And that stupid crying baby that distracted the pilots.
I think buyers should make it a significant due diligence item to dig in to project failure track record.
Tell us about 5 projects/accounts where things did go wrong. We have never had any, is not an acceptable answer. What did you do to fix the issues? If it was mostly the client's fault, what did you to attempt to warn them and mitigate for their errors? Did you do a detailed post-mortem on what went wrong? How were your methods, estimating tools etc updated for those mistakes? How was that information propagated to other similar customer projects? How was it used to update your training? How did your q.a. processes incorporate them? If the problems were technology related, did your business development guys highlight it to your technology vendor partner?
Clients pay a premium to SIs and outsourcers compared to internal staff rates. They have a right to be protected by them even if they make bad decisions. They pay for the airbags to deploy as they are supposed to.
