Many times if management is not computer literate, words will have little impact because they don't understand the entire development process. Convincing them seems to depend on how willing they are to learn, how willing they are to trust you, how able you are to verbalize, and how much time you have to prove your point.

Being a hardcore geek with no appreciable verbal skills, I've never been good at this in the past. Luckily at the moment I have a good boss that is very computer literate.

For example, one big problem is that many don't grasp how hard development really is. Even if they grudgingly admit, from past experience and anecdotal evidence, that it is hard and takes a long time, deep down in their heart many don't understand why, and are unwilling for whatever reason to find out why. I can only assume this is because they've never had to go through the design/write/test/debug/test/release/take some heat/fix/rerelease/maintain process themselves and boil it down to just the "write" phase.

Unfortunately, I've seen this manifset itself as distrust of the programming staff ("Those slackers have been writing that new OS for over two whole weeks -- why isn't it finished!?" :-). For more in-depth analysis, see Dilbert...

bluto