I’m having a crisis of confidence as regards corporate IT. Every time I hear a timeframe of six months, or a budget in six or even seven digits, I cringe. The words ‘functional spec’ send shivers up my spine. Even the smallest things seem to take days.
Conventional wisdom says CMS projects are inherently B-I-G deals. They just aren’t. What’s a blog, if not a Content Management System? Words go in, pages come out. Presentation is separated from content. Authors get a nice authoring interface. What more is there?
I can have a CMS / blog up and running at WordPress.com in a matter of minutes – and people are doing so in their hundreds, every day. If I was feeling really eager, I might download WordPress and install it on my own server, for extra control and reassurance. Still only a day’s work, and a fairly relaxed day at that. I’d be posting new material that very evening, and showing up on the search engines within a few days.
What more do I get from the project that takes six months on paper, almost certainly longer in reality, and costs an eyewatering amount? Granted, my blog site probably won’t do everything I want. But I’ve seen it too many times… you get to the end of the big project, and guess what? You still don’t get exactly what you wanted. But you’re six months older and significantly poorer.
If there’s a better example of the law of diminishing returns, I can’t think of it.