3 ms·

From reading the wiki article, it says the goal was to replace the payroll system for 89,000 people by 1999. By 1997, it went live in a staged rollout for 10,00

From reading the wiki article, it says the goal was to replace the payroll system for 89,000 people by 1999. By 1997, it went live in a staged rollout for 10,000 employees. Within the same year, the performance of the software improved 8300%. Sadly, Chrysler was bought[1] out in 1998 and the project was canceled in the year 2000 for unknown reasons. 1999 when it was intended to be fully deployed, Crystler was in the middle of a reorganization, which would lead to layoffs of more than 21,000 people in the next 3 years. I'd guess organizational politics had more to do with the cancellation than anything the development team did wrong. [1] Oh, sure it was labeled "a merger of equals", but consider that the share price fell to 50% within a year afterward and Crystler was eventually split off and sold... it just makes me think of the Time Warner + AOL merger.

bsder 9y ago
Starting here also gives an interesting view of whether of not it was a "success": https://books.google.com/books?id=Nxi7O7FCdIEC&pg=PA43&lpg=PA50&ots=n0leM5OZaQ&focus=viewport&dq=chrysler+comprehensive+compensation+post+mortem https://books.google.com/books?id=Nxi7O7FCdIEC&pg=PA43&lpg=P... To be fair, he has an axe to grind, but C3 was quite far from a success. To be fair, big projects fail. A lot. For many reasons. So, I'm not going to blame the people involved. And I find Fowler to actually be probably the most level-headed of the bunch to come out of that project. However, I WILL apply requisite amounts of skepticism when those same people start peddling their "expert knowledge" about subject matter in which they provably didn't "beat the average".
- acdha 9y ago
  That reads like a lot of accusation without much evidence, and the author's credibility was immediately called into question for me when they dismissed Y2k as a non-issue because it didn't produce widespread problems, ignoring all of the problems which had been fixed in the previous decade. (This is like the people saying closures after a snow storm weren't necessary because there was no traffic, ignoring the reason why) The only real lesson I feel comfortable drawing from that is that we need more diverse case-studies than C3 because very few other projects are going to have the same environment with a huge company, multi-divisional politics and then a merger happening shortly into the project, one of the best defined problems, etc.

bsder 9y ago

Starting here also gives an interesting view of whether of not it was a "success": https://books.google.com/books?id=Nxi7O7FCdIEC&pg=PA43&lpg=PA50&ots=n0leM5OZaQ&focus=viewport&dq=chrysler+comprehensive+compensation+post+mortem https://books.google.com/books?id=Nxi7O7FCdIEC&pg=PA43&lpg=P... To be fair, he has an axe to grind, but C3 was quite far from a success. To be fair, big projects fail. A lot. For many reasons. So, I'm not going to blame the people involved. And I find Fowler to actually be probably the most level-headed of the bunch to come out of that project. However, I WILL apply requisite amounts of skepticism when those same people start peddling their "expert knowledge" about subject matter in which they provably didn't "beat the average".

acdha 9y ago
That reads like a lot of accusation without much evidence, and the author's credibility was immediately called into question for me when they dismissed Y2k as a non-issue because it didn't produce widespread problems, ignoring all of the problems which had been fixed in the previous decade. (This is like the people saying closures after a snow storm weren't necessary because there was no traffic, ignoring the reason why) The only real lesson I feel comfortable drawing from that is that we need more diverse case-studies than C3 because very few other projects are going to have the same environment with a huge company, multi-divisional politics and then a merger happening shortly into the project, one of the best defined problems, etc.