{"id":232,"date":"2006-01-26T15:29:54","date_gmt":"2006-01-26T22:29:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/wp\/?p=232"},"modified":"2006-01-26T15:29:54","modified_gmt":"2006-01-26T22:29:54","slug":"down_the_drain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=232","title":{"rendered":"Down the drain"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following in the footsteps<\/a> of McDonald’s, Ford, the FBI and many others, Lloyd’s of London has pulled the plug<\/a> on a big, expensive, and now embarrassing software project. Launched five years ago, the effort was aimed at modernizing the venerable insurance group’s brokering processes and making them “paperless.” But the new system never enticed users to actually use it – the cure turned out to be worse than the disease. Lloyd’s ended up wasting 70 million pounds – about $125 million – on the project before chief executive Michael Dawson concluded this week that “the platform was not optimal in ensuring more efficient business processes for the Lloyd’s and London market and as a result it will close.”<\/p>\n

There are three lessons here. First is that the bigger the software project, the more likely it is to collapse under its own weight. $100 million seems like the line beyond which failure is almost assured. Second is that you should always create software to solve the day-to-day problems faced by the actual users, not to meet big abstract organizational challenges. Solve enough little problems, and the big ones take care of themselves. Fail to make users’ lives easier, and they’ll simply bypass the system (and never trust anything you do ever again). Third and finally, you should never give a software project a catchy codename. For Ford, it was Project Everest; for McDonald’s, it was Project Innovate; for Lloyd’s, it was Project Kinnect. If you’re about to launch an IT initiative big enough to warrant its own name, you should probably make sure you have a really good golden parachute.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Following in the footsteps of McDonald’s, Ford, the FBI and many others, Lloyd’s of London has pulled the plug on a big, expensive, and now embarrassing software project. Launched five years ago, the effort was aimed at modernizing the venerable insurance group’s brokering processes and making them “paperless.” But the new system never enticed users […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=232"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/232\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=232"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}