https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/ How software-dependent corporates built structures that reward the appearance of productivity over actual productivity, and why AI changes the economics. Articles by Adrian McPhee. en https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/why-big-it-projects-fail/ https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/why-big-it-projects-fail/ Thu, 26 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Big IT projects fail because they are big and because they are IT projects. The label repackages business change as technology delivery, guarantees failure, and ensures IT gets blamed. https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/drive-vs-drift/ https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/drive-vs-drift/ Tue, 17 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 AI changes the economics of execution. The right unit of management is no longer the backlog. It is the milestone artefact, the proof loop, and the weekly judgement about whether Drive is beating Drift. https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/where-this-is-hard/ https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/where-this-is-hard/ Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The strongest objections: irreducible complexity, scale, legacy, why large firms centralised in the first place, and how political immune systems kill reform. https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/what-happens-next/ https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/what-happens-next/ Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 The gap between organisations that reconcile and those that narrate will become visible in cost, speed, truthfulness, and willingness of the best people to stay. https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/the-strategy-deck-that-ate-the-company/ https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/the-strategy-deck-that-ate-the-company/ Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 A CTO spends four days building a board pack that describes a cleaner organisation than he actually runs. At each management level, ambiguity resolves in favour of narrative. https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/the-strategic-context-stack/ https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/the-strategic-context-stack/ Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Purpose, vision, mission, strategy, goals, OKRs, KPIs: what each word is supposed to mean, why most organisations use them interchangeably, and why AI exposes the confusion. https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/the-separation/ https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/the-separation/ Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Software-dependent corporates learned to manage descriptions of work instead of the work itself. AI changes the cost of discovering whether those descriptions match reality. https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/the-process-is-the-product/ https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/the-process-is-the-product/ Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 What happens when a single business process gets a real owner, a structured definition, and a machine that checks whether the definition matches production every week. https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/the-polished-lie/ https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/the-polished-lie/ Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 A European retailer deploys AI to answer leadership questions about operational metrics. For three months, nobody checks whether the answers are true. https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/the-people-who-knew/ https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/the-people-who-knew/ Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Lisa is a senior engineer who sees incoherence before anyone else. The organisation selects against her structurally. When she leaves, years of accumulated context leave with her. https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/the-meeting-that-replaced-the-work/ https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/the-meeting-that-replaced-the-work/ Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Twelve people attend a cross-functional alignment session to coordinate a change that should take two days. It will take seven weeks. Nobody owns the process end-to-end. https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/the-machine-that-reads-your-strategy/ https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/the-machine-that-reads-your-strategy/ Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 A CTO asks an AI to reconcile the strategy document against the architecture model and the codebase. The contradictions appear in minutes. The CEO asks for silence. https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/the-fork-in-the-road/ https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/the-fork-in-the-road/ Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Two insurers start in the same place. One uses AI to write a better board pack. The other uses AI to discover whether the board pack matches reality. Twelve months later, they are in different worlds. https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/the-diagnostic-toolkit/ https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/the-diagnostic-toolkit/ Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 Five questions for boards, a writer-vs-reader scorecard, a 90-day launch sequence, a glossary of corporate euphemism, and sample process definitions. https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/the-cfo-who-killed-the-platform/ https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/the-cfo-who-killed-the-platform/ Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 A European insurer kills a shared integration platform because it doesn't show ROI in year one. The incidents arrive months later, attributed to engineering quality. https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/the-brochureware-moment/ https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/the-brochureware-moment/ Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 In 1998, a British retailer built an impressive website that couldn't process a single order. Most companies are doing the same thing with AI today. https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/fake-boundaries/ https://simpleisadvanced.com/articles/fake-boundaries/ Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000 "Customer Engagement" has a roadmap, a budget, and a quarterly review. It does not have a coherent system boundary. The product does not exist as a thing that can be built or measured.