Peter Crowther wrote:
...
lots of good comments. (Thanks.)
I suspect you're coming from a background of solving "hard" problems, where throwing tin at the job is acceptable, to a world where return on investment determines whether a project can be justified or not. ...
Heh. Bingo.
But the other side of the coin is that so many projects in this "easy problem" world are failures. A higher failure rate than the clean-slate hard problem world!
I've had a $300K hard-problem budget zero'ed because, in part, the last easy-problem folks spent $26M (some say $52M) to implement a very standard three-tier system that didn't work. OK. I get that. This is the way it is, and I've got plenty to say about that, too, over a beer.
But I'm an engineer. I want to understand why the three-tier projects fail. And how to avoid that. I know that there are people who can make them succeed despite the math, using leadership and operations research and charm and ruthlessness and lots of money, or whatever. But that's not my domain. I may not have the choice to always pick the right tool for the job, but I do want to try to understand what makes something the right (or wrong) tool.