By Minda Zetlin at ComputerWorld.com…
Not long ago, IT consultant Mark A. Gilmore was called in to help an IT department that was struggling with project overload. “They’d gotten this kind of attitude — the executive vice president calls it ‘Burger King Syndrome,'” he recalls. “Their approach was, ‘You can have it your way.'”
The business executives believed IT could supply whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted it. Salespeople had gotten into the habit of asking the development team to create applications within a week to fulfill promises they’d made to customers. As a result, IT employees were spending about 80% of their time reacting to crises or struggling to meet impossible deadlines rather than calmly planning their workloads, says Gilmore, president of Wired Integrations in San Jose.