Often in software I find myself preaching restraint to those who wish to move platforms for no apparent reason than to keep up with the IT fashion industry; however, even harder than the silver-bullet chasers is dealing with organizations where change is required, not only in a company's software stack, but throughout their entire IT department.

Recently I was involved in a customer project where the client had managed to bravely remain on a 30-year-old computing platform, while the IT fads of the '80s and '90s passed them by and were now embracing the new millennium by moving to a client/server architecture.

The first red flag with the project was that the client created a huge working group to size and spec up the new system, initially breaking off into different teams to assess various pieces of the problem. Much time was spent arguing about which technology to use, after which the IT manager, after a quick glance along his local bookstore shelf, unanimously chose for us and additionally decided that we should all embark on use case analysis.