Corporate Waste

In fact, the combination of project disasters and fickle or crisis driven management frequently insures that we don't ship software. Talking with an old friend and fellow programmer a few weeks ago, we tried to put a number to this. What we came up with was that of all the projects we'd worked on, only 10% of the code we'd written ever saw the light of day by being released as a product for use by customers, whether it was shrink wrapped products or internal IT systems. This means that 90% - yes, you heard me right, 90% - of all the projects we've worked on died a premature death and never saw implementation in the field. Sometimes it's a good old fashioned project disaster (I don't think I need to define that term with this crowd). Other times, it's simply capricious decision making, constantly changing direction to go with whatever is trendy or politically expedient. And of course, there's always crisis management, where a project never gets completed because it's put on hold so that we can be assigned to putting out a different fire, only to be pulled off that effort for yet another.

In other words, 9 times out of 10, all of the time, effort, blood, sweat and tears we put into those systems, not to mention the financial cost incurred, was for nothing. The code was simply thrown away. Yes, we try to stash away the clever bits of code we've written to be used later, but the rate that technology changes usually minimizes the benefits of this. Overall, it's just money out the window.

Having heard this story over and over again from developers the world over, it slowly became clear to me over the years that this wasn't an uncommon scenario. As my mind reeled over the staggering amount of waste that is the norm in the development industry, one question kept recurring over and over again. Why? Why would any company willingly throw that kind of money into the fireplace, shrug it off as business as usual, and then embark on yet another project that would ultimately suffer the same fate? If you think of a business as an organization which exists for the purpose of making a profit, your brain will eventually reboot. It just doesn't make any sense. Or does it?