What Made Gertie Gallop?: Learning from Project Failures (Industrial Engineering) [Hardcover]

The big news last week was that a government study group released details about the next leap forward for the Internet, including transmission speeds up to 100 faster than the current 56k standard. Already, people are muttering that it isn't fair that these benefits will be rolled out first to universities and government facilities. Hey, people. I have been corresponding for the past month with a gentleman from Bombay who would commit high crimes to have 56k, and optic fiber leading to his home. His name is O.P. Kharbanda, and he is, like me, a business writer, having authored some 30 books on project management, disaster response, and other topics, including What Made Gertie Gallop? Lessons from Project Failures, co-authored with Jeffrey Pinto. In fact, I would paste the label of management guru on him, except that the word guru seems suddenly very provincial. But at 74, he is of an age to have accumulated some wisdom. He signs his email Om - because that is his name. Dr. Kharbanda's complaint - I almost said beef - is that he can't be a full player in the online revolution because the infrastructure where he is won't let him. "My system is admittedly not the latest," he writes. "I have a 486 PC with 16 megabytes of RAM, a 200-megabyte hard disk, CD-ROM, and 2400 baud modem. I run DOS, though I can run Windows 3.1 as well. I connect to the Internet via pine (email) and lynx (a text-based browser)." So when I invited Dr. Kharbanda to visit my web site, he really couldn't. Lynx is a poor way to grapple with the multimedia offerings of the Web. And the phone connections he relies on in Calcutta are poor. Many disconnects, lots of line noise, not nearly enough fiber optic. It's not a tin can on a string, but it's not a T1 line, either. Though the middle class in India is discovering and delighting in the Internet, the experience is substandard. Only four metro areas (Calcutta, Chenai, Mumbai and New Delhi) have Internet service that he is aware of, and only a few thousand customers are enrolled so far. Without proper phone lines and without a graphic browser, you can't see someone else's Web page, much less put up one of your own. Because communications are crummy, Dr. Kharbanda has been unable to police his work the way authors in the U.S. do. When he finally was able to contact Amazon.com, for instance, they had no clue who he was, despite having about 20 of his books on their list. Even his publishers, owing to the departure of editors and the acquisition of whole houses, weren't quite sure who he was. Anyway, I have decided to put Dr. Kharbanda's writing back on the map. Starting today, he has a Web site, backboned onto mine, at http://www.skypoint.com/~mfinley/kharbanda.htm. I'm going to see if I can teach him how to send me a photo of himself. If you're into project management, give it a look. Dr. Kharbanda is a hero to me, for being eager to learn and undertake big new projects at a goodly age, despite the disadvantages of bad technology. The rest of you, complaining about 56k being only 53k - shaddup! by Michael Finley Copyright © 1998 by Michael Finley Co-author of Transcompetition: Moving beyond Competition and Collaboration.