Managing change
Situation critical
The development of the iPlayer has been such a long and drawn-out affair that you can't help but think that there have been some fundamental failures in the project's management or its software development. (Or maybe it was a mistake to announce the project too soon, unless any form of announcement was strictly unavoidable.)
You can't really blame the BBC Trust since they have only been in existence for just over a year, and their approval of the project was relatively swift by comparison with its development time. And even after all that effort, the iPlayer still only supports PC's running Windows, which isn't really something you can blame on government or the BBC Trust.
Apart from picking on easy targets such as sacking journalists and newsreaders to save money (as people seem to be doing at the moment), it may be more appropriate to take a good long look at the existing BBC management structure in order to see where appropriate changes could be made there instead.
This could be forced out of sheer financial necessity, however, regardless of any feedback from the relative failure of the iPlayer project, and only then will all the ghosts from the Birt era will be put to rest, allowing the BBC to finally move on from its state of partial paralysis.
