Preface

In the earliest years of my professional life I had the luxury of working closely with a somewhat autonomous group to develop software applications to support our nation's courts. My personal forte was child support and enforcement. For two years I worked in that role all the while learning as much about motivation, management, work style, team-work and success as I did about software development. That stint was followed by many years as a manager of software projects at a major university in my home town. During the first part of that I made myself a student of software development. I focused not so much on ``what is the best way'' to develop software. Instead, I studied the different tools and techniques available and their overall effectiveness. Then, due to the stress of managing multiple, large and important projects concurrently with a small staff, I began to shift my focus to a study of project management, or project leadership as I prefer to call it. I recognized that more often than not, projects were ending up less than successful.

This is about the time that visual development tools, object-oriented design and programming and client/server in general arrived on the scene. This complicated the problems developers and project teams faced. The technology was becoming more complex and more people were involved in the projects. The proliferation of local area networks and personal computers had created a class of demanding end-users--something we Information Systems professionals were not at all comfortable with. It was at this time that I saw an opportunity in these changes. I saw a chance to change my organization for the better by developing information systems applications a different way so as to provide greater productivity and better information to those who needed it wherever they might reside in the organization.

Also at this time, the university purchased PeopleSoft Human Resource Management System and followed that closely with the Financial applications. This convinced me further of the growing importance of information to an organization's success. During the implementations of PeopleSoft, I learned much about these issues as well as about the trials of the projects themselves. PeopleSoft brought great change to many organizations significantly for the better. It brought many improvements to the university as well. Politics and limited resources left me thirsting for significant growth instead of the incremental growth we had experienced. My frustration level increased as I saw more and more opportunity. The Internet was pushing its way beyond its academic walls and was poised to take the world by storm. To ease my frustrations, I moved on to greater challenges where I had an opportunity to apply my studies. To exercise my demons, though, I needed another outlet. That is where this book comes in. I so profoundly believe that this is a defining period for organizations world-wide that I feel compelled to help my fellow Americans in the corporate world succeed wildly because of it. This book represents my efforts to help them attain higher levels of success based on my experience with the software and years of studying information systems projects. To that end, writing it did provide me an outlet. To fully exercise those demons, though, this book must actually help corporations to have more successful implementations of PeopleSoft applications and to make them more competitive because of it. If it can do that for even one project team, then I feel my hard work will not have been in vain and the resistance to change I faced will be replaced with a sense of success and closure.