About

David Fernandez - Founder

 

Once upon a time I was given a emailer marketing project to run as a software engineer. The project had been running for a long time without coming to fruition. It had become a thing of legend at my employer and that was never a good sign. Partly because nobody really knew what a good emailing system should look like, all concerned parties did their best to agree a set of features for the new system. Meanwhile in the tech department, which included me, we pondered how to integrate business systems with third-party technologies at a time long before integration as a standard became an expectation.

To cut to the chase... despite the inauspicious start, I turned around the project in around six months – which for my first major tech contribution at the start of my career, I was pretty proud of. Functionally the application worked as requested and as expected, and even drew the business into new technology. So all’s well that ends well, right?

What my inexperience didn’t prepare me for, was the fallout between stakeholders resulting from the long delay in delivery, which by this time was around t+2years. There was talk of opportunity cost, missed marketing campaigns, missed sales targets – most of which I didn’t understand but I learned quickly.

These failings became the main story.

Ever since that first tech project I’ve been fascinated by tech programmes, projects and products which are in distress or crisis. In fact I’ve made it the bedrock of my career. Then in 2021 when I signed on to do a Masters degree with the Open University in the UK, I discovered there were others who were equally fascinated by IS failures.

So here, we will cover some of the fundamentals about failure – what we know, what we don’t and crucially what to do about it.