I was at miniSPA last Friday and David Harvey kicked us off with a quick warm-up exercise to get us into the mood. Each group was asked to come up with a maximum of ten words to complete the following:

“Hey, I hear you’re an IT manager and you’re consistenly failing to deliver software on time and within budget. The best advice I can give you is …”

Various ideas were floated by the various groups including the frivoulous - ask for a pay rise, hire a consultant and go to SPA2007 and after each group had chosen one piece of advice a vote was taken and the winner was (along the lines of)

Work out what went wrong

Learn from your mistakes

Which I’m happy to suggest came from the group I was in.

I’ll hopefully get a chance to post some more on miniSPA before I head off to SPLC 2006, in the meantime let us know what your advice would have been.