Sometime in 2009, a colleague and I sat down and decided to write a book.

Not because we had really given it a serious thought. Not because we had a marketing plan. Because we had spent the better part of a decade watching software projects go sideways in ways that were, in hindsight, almost entirely preventable — and we thought someone should say so plainly. And also because our friend and mentor, Rajesh Setty nudged us to do so, and another friend and coach, Dr. Mitchel Levy, was kind enough (and ready!) to publish it through the Think AHA series of books.

The result was #ProjectManagementTweet — 140 bite-sized insights on managing projects, distilled from our combined experience in the trenches of software delivery. It came out in 2010. A small book. A modest reach. But every insight in it was earned the hard way.

I have been thinking about that book a lot lately.

A lot has changed. The fundamentals haven’t.

In the fifteen years since that book was published, I’ve led professional services organisations serving over 120 enterprise customers globally. I’ve carried P&L responsibility for a $15m Professional Services business unit that was part of a $45 million SaaS platform. I’ve managed teams of 135 people across multiple continents. I’ve sat across the table from C-suite executives at some of the world’s largest academic publishers, negotiated multi-year agreements, and — more than once — walked into a programme that was months behind schedule and millions over budget, with a team that had stopped believing it could be saved.

And in every one of those situations, the problems we faced traced back to something we had already written down in that book in 2010.

Not because the book was prophetic. Because the fundamentals of how complex technology initiatives succeed or fail have not changed. The tools have evolved. The platforms have multiplied. The vocabulary has shifted. But the underlying dynamics — how expectations get misaligned, how risk goes unacknowledged, how trust erodes between a sponsor and a delivery team — those are as old as organisations themselves.

Why Dubai? Why now?

In October 2024, I moved from the United States to Dubai. After more than 25 years of building and leading technology delivery organisations in the US — most recently as Vice President of Client Management at John Wiley & Sons — I made a deliberate choice to start something new, in a new geography, at what I consider the most interesting moment in the region’s technology story.

The UAE is undergoing a digital transformation of real ambition. Governments, semi-government bodies, family conglomerates, and growth-stage businesses are investing heavily in enterprise software. The vision is genuine. The urgency is real. And the gap — between the ambition of what is being commissioned and the governance of how it is being delivered — is significant.

That gap is exactly where ITegrity Solutions exists.

I founded this firm to provide what I wish had been more available when I was on the other side of the table: independent, senior-level oversight for complex technology programmes. Someone who has actually run these engagements, who speaks the language of both the boardroom and the build team, and who has no incentive other than the client’s success.

What is this series?

Starting this week, I will publish a post here every Wednesday for the next year.

Each post is anchored to one of the 140 insights from #ProjectManagementTweet — a book I co-authored over fifteen years ago — paired with a real story from my career that brings it to life. The tweets are short. The stories behind them are not.

These are not posts for project managers, though project managers will find value in them.

They are written for the people who commission, fund, and ultimately own the outcomes of complex technology initiatives. For the CIO who is six months into an ERP implementation that has already missed its first milestone. For the COO of a family business who approved a digital transformation budget and is now wondering what they are actually getting for it. For the technology sponsor who has a vendor telling them everything is fine, and a gut feeling that it isn’t.

I’ve been that person’s counterpart for thirty years. I know what they need to hear — and more importantly, what they’re rarely told.

A word on the name

I’ve called this blog ITerations — a deliberate play on two ideas that sit at the heart of what I do. The first is IT, the domain I’ve worked in for thirty years. The second is iteration — the process by which real learning happens. Not in a single experience, but across many: the same types of problems encountered in different contexts, at different scales, with different people, until the pattern becomes clear. This is how humans learn. And learning never stops. Every post in this series is one iteration of that process. Thirty years of them, distilled one week at a time.

What to expect

One post per week. Each one starts with a tweet from the book. Each one tells a story — real, anonymised where necessary, but specific enough that you will recognise the situation if you have ever been in it. Each one ends with a lesson that you can apply the following week.

I will also share each post on LinkedIn. If you prefer to read it there, follow me at linkedin.com/in/himanshujhamb. If you prefer to read it here on ITerations — the ITegrity Solutions blog — bookmark itegrityglobalsolutions.com. Either way, I will see you every week.

The first tweet I have chosen to write about is this one:

A project only exists in the story about it. Make it a good story.

I chose it first because I think it is the most important thing I have ever understood about my work — and because it applies as much to the act of starting this blog as it does to every programme I have ever overseen.

The story your technology initiative is telling right now, inside your organisation, is either building confidence or eroding it. There is no neutral.

Let’s talk about that next soon.