IT Mismanagement
Patterns

We wrote this book to help managers and engineers understand each other better. It is based around common situations that may look sad and unfortunate if you are stuck inside them, or funny and laughable if you are not. We describe these IT mismanagement patterns and give them names so the readers would know them when they see them and have common terminology for discussion.

We are practitioners of both management and tech and we have described what we have encountered in our own practice. The book is not supposed to be comprehensive: we have seen much but nobody has seen it all. Likewise, our ideas on how to build a healthy IT organisation and remedy specific instances of mismanagement may be limited in applicability and fail to hold water in many other ways. In any case, fixing the world was not our goal. We wanted you to have fun while reading the book and to acquire the terminology and context to discuss the issues of IT mismanagement in a constructive and positive way, no matter where in your organisation's food chain you are.