IT Success!: Towards a New Model for Information Technology

5.4. Why prototyping has never become mainstream

Prototyping in various forms first emerged as long ago as the 1980s and has been successfully implemented in many companies around the world. For examples of real-world successes, please refer to an article by Harvard Professor, Rob Austin, entitled 'No Crystal Ball for IT', and the case studies in 'The CRM Project Management Handbook' (see 'Further reading' at the end of Chapter 9).

However, prototyping success stories have generally been more the result of individual initiatives rather than part of any official policy at senior IT and business level. My own case is representative of this: every project I've ever managed in my IT career, in multiple functional areas, countries and industry sectors, with solutions bought or built, was based on the iterative approach. I have never once asked a business user to sign off a contractual document – and delivered enough successful projects not to convince me to change my methods. However, the very same organizations were dominantly waterfall, and I worked alongside other project managers who had only ever worked using the waterfall approach. The CIOs or directors we all reported to were too busy dealing with fire-fighting and trying to square the circle of unlimited demand and limited resources to even care how their senior managers were running their particular application area, as long as they obtained results.

Let us now examine the main reasons why prototyping has never become mainstream, ...