Know Why You're Taking the Risk
New, inexpensive technology provides greater access to and more uses for information. With Visual Basic 6, there is a major challenge to technical departments to deliver the technology benefits quickly. Effective development means delivering swiftly and economically so that the business can gain competitive advantage or make strategic shifts.
New technology provides businesses with new opportunities to one-up their competitors. This advantage will be short-lived because the competition will rapidly equal or better the development. This competitiveness produces even more pressure to achieve results in record time.
The same new technology provides IT departments with the challenge of learning about and using it. The pace of change, the visibility of new technology, and the need to exploit it quickly mean that system development has become very high risk. You can lower this risk by ensuring that you understand the technology.
In this context, it's vital to understand how to balance risk and benefit. Only the business managers can judge whether the benefits are worth the risks, so project managers must be able to communicate with the business managers about these issues.
Visual Basic 6 provides even more productivity tools, and tools to build productivity tools. You can reduce the risks if you invest in learning and developing wizards, add-ins, templates, and other reusable components.