Is a carefully managed IT lifecycle always good for the business? I once had a junior front office support role (my first Perl job in fact) where I sat in a team of three Perl/Sybase/unix people. One day a trader came along (at 11am) and said "I need this Reuters page published by 3pm". The team leader asked, "what is the impact if it isn't ready on time?". "Oh, we'll lose about $100 million" came the reply.

The team-leader said to me: "we can't allow the business to put that kind of pressure on our IT methodologies - leave this with me and don;t do anything." -- and wandered off.

Thanks to the power of Perl and my experience with language processing software in general, I had a working database to Reuters-page translation programme ready in time. Meanwhile the team-leader had gone and got permission from the global head of IT to say no and let the trader lose the $100 million. The value of the IT department's work for a year can't possibly have amounted to that much! Needless to say I lost that position soon after because I didn't fit in (and wouldn't have wanted to!).