“Few IT projects are displays of rational decision-making from which AI can or should learn.”

This report from by Robert Charette for IEEE Spectrum on “How IT Mangagers Fail Software Projects” is just fire and should be required reading for anyone looking to reuse or “train” their existing management into a crack team to deploy AI into their systems.

If you’ve been working in the software development business for any length of time, most of what’s in this report won’t come as a surprise: poor risk and investment management, bad process, shoddy leadership, and a near endless ability to refuse to learn from past mistakes. And we keep handing the keys back to the same people that drove the last car into the ditch!

It’s a well researched piece and I would recommend you spend the time reading it, as if we know anything about most software projects, it’s that they seldom learn from their mistakes and AI will only increase the risk and opacity!

He lays it out plain and simply here:

“Frustratingly, the IT community stubbornly fails to learn from prior failures. IT project managers routinely claim that their project is somehow different or unique and, thus, lessons from previous failures are irrelevant. That is the excuse of the arrogant, though usually not the ignorant.”

Ouch!