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Comment by arpinum | Hacker News Reader

The 250+ page analysis of the incident was an excellent insight into how large IT projects fail: https://www.tsb.co.uk/news-releases/slaughter-and-may/slaugh...

money quote: > This situation has all the hallmarks of business management strong-arming the IT organization into an unrealistic timeline. When business leaders push for overly-aggressive timelines, or regulators ask for multiple competing risk frameworks and excessive after-the-fact incident reporting, this all puts a strain on the delivery organization’s ability to untangle the complexity before ‘go live’.

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The report is by Slaughter & May, one of the more delightful company names in the City of London.

My understanding was that they’re a law firm, perhaps they’ve also branched into IT consultancy?

Law firms are often hired to conduct independent reviews when things go wrong or when allegations of wrongdoing are made, e.g. RBS in 2013,[1] RICS in 2018,[2] Baker McKenzie in 2018[3], and UNICEF in 2020.[4][5]

1. https://www.natwestgroup.com/news-and-insights/feature-conte...

2. https://www.rics.org/uk/about-rics/corporate-governance/inde...

3. https://www.legalbusiness.co.uk/blogs/metoo-latest-bakers-ap...

4. https://www.unicef.org.uk/press-releases/unicef-uk-confirms-...

5. https://www.civilsociety.co.uk/news/unicef-appoints-differen...

Generally legal firms like this will have domain specialists.

No this kind of thing is called an audit and law firms are typically involved.

> they’re a law firm, perhaps they’ve also branched into IT consultancy?

And that's exactly how such IT disasters begin.

Sadly far too often managers and decisionmakers think timeline and deadlines is a topic for haggle, not discussion. They treat it same as haggling on a bazaar.

In many cases it can be though.

If I'm asked for an estimate to do X and I say I can deliver in three weeks, and my boss says customer needs it for golive in three days, I'll try to find some way of making that work. Perhaps they can live without a full solution for the first few weeks, instead requiring only a subset of the requirements in that period. Or, if I insist it just cannot be done, I'll tell the boss who'll try to push back golive if it's important enough.

There needs to be respect for each other and the project though.

That's a discussion. Not haggling.

Demanding the same for less is haggling. As if we can magic time reductions out of our asses without cutting features .

Fair enough, I interpreted it a bit differently.

Of course on any project I might be able to deliver the same in less time, but then at the expense of something else. That might be acceptable if the boss thinks he can manage the other clients which work gets delayed.

Another write up:

https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252474170/TSB-programme-...

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