Why is Hollywood substantially better at running large projects than your IT-department?

First of all, my experience is that IT-projects are started on a whim, without proper scope, estimates, funding and stakeholder commitments, e.g. business as usual. To have a green light for a feature film, you need to have your ducks in order. You will end up with an indie film that will fail if you don’t do your homework. One 3% of them are profitable and more or less in the same grassroots league as a large IT project.

Second, a new feature film is often a greenfield endeavor and the director doesn’t need to think of the past, unless you are doing a sequel or two with you godfather. But we have TV-series that have been running for ages, they have their legacy. But they also have a production bible and a show runner. The production bible describes what have happened in previous episodes and the show runner is responsible for over arching story and that things fits together. Do you recognize the role in business and IT?

IT-project are very very seldom greenfield projects and the legacy we have is mostly not documented. Think of making the last episode of Game of Thrones without knowing what happened in previous episodes.

Third, humans and film critics (in you think the are human) define if they think it’s good enough, not yet machines, which means there is a softer success criteria’s for movies. Compare this with two different IT systems, that have different integration concepts, will not work together. IT-systems on the other hand can ship updates afterwards. So far only one Hollywood film got a major update after release.

My take on this is that within IT, we are more sloppy because we can fix things afterwards. We don’t need to get it the first time, unless it’s a spaceship, nuclear power plant or a self driving car.

Disruptive architecture