Where IT Projects Fail
Information Technology (IT) projects take place within all three business domains1:
- ‘The Business’ Domain: the ‘executive culture’, business intelligence, goals, strategies and development & investment policies,
- The Systems and Processes Domain: the 'engineering-technical culture', and
- The People Domain: the 'operational culture': individuals, teams, the daily running of things and the corporate codes of behaviour.
Large scale projects bring together all the complexities of these three domains and their interactions. The fact that practically all significant IT projects involve multiple stakeholders — internal and external — only increases their complexity.
To succeed, these projects require strong alignment of the three domains and their cultures and a high level of trust and coordination between all stakeholders involved. Driven by time and budget constraints, businesses tend to quickly 'get on' with the practical (technical) side of the project, leaving the alignment somewhat to chance.
This lack of alignment leads to working at cross purposes: different stakeholders have different expectations; a clear, shared understanding of success criteria is lacking; co-ordination and collaboration tools and procedures have not been put in place, resulting in deficient information flow, involvement and timely reporting.
Any larger scale IT project is by definition also a change project. It aims to change the way things are done to produce improved process flow and business results and will have a significant impact on the way the business operates, during and after the project. Very often, the true scope and impact of the changes involved only come to the surface during the course of the project, causing 'unexpected' problems, delays and complications.
With the many factors influencing the well-being and success of large IT projects, managing them forms a major challenge for any organisation and indeed, more often than not, these projects end up running over on time and budget and/or failing to deliver the results the business invested in. A major study done in the mid-90s, for example, found that 30% of IT projects surveyed were completely abandoned. An additional 50% ended up over budget (typically by a factor of 2 or more), over schedule by a factor of 2, and only meeting a third of the originally specified functionality2.
There are many reasons quoted for the high failure rate of IT projects3. Project Management methodologies offer many tools to improve the way projects are planned and managed, yet a scrutiny of the causes for IT project failures reveals that even a meticulous application of those tools does not address many of the problems involved.
Project Management methodologies are about managing the project itself. They do not prescribe how to align the project to the business, its cultural domains and its strategic objectives, or how to achieve involvement, cooperation, coordination and trust amongst stakeholders. Project Management methodologies also do not prescribe how to set up effective timely communications, nor how to effectively engage all people and stakeholders involved.
Prince2 for example (see figure below4), explicitly, only covers a small part of the broader context around an IT project and does not cover the full scope of the project itself. It assumes the appropriate engagement of the context and prescribes conditions, input and feedback loops for such engagement, but does not provide methodologies and tools to carry those out.
In practice, more often than not, the engagement is limited to documents being produced without the creation of a real understanding or alignment. People-, expectations- or quality-management, for example, become a paper exercise.
To succeed projects need tools and methodologies for lasting engagement and involvement of stakeholders, for timely and effective communication within and around the project, for appropriate engagement of the cultural domains involved, for high-level strategic alignment, and for effective collaboration of all parties and stakeholders involved, including the alignment of goals, expectations and the pathways to achieving them.
In a space where predictability cannot be assumed5 — as is the case with any truly complex environment — traditional planning and control methodologies, that are based on the assumption of predictability, are not sufficient to manage the complex, fast moving and potentially volatile environment and the inherent risks involved.
Initially, an appropriate systemic mapping of the domain (in this case the project) is essential to negotiate complexity successfully. It is then necessary to put mechanisms in place for early detection of trends and for well-informed, speedy responses to developing trends.
Collaboration, in its broader sense, is the only way to create the setting, conditions and mechanisms to successfully negotiate the complexities that are by definition inherent to large scale IT projects.
http://www.it-cortex.com/Stat_Failure_Rate.htm and http://www.projectperfect.com.au/info_it_projects_fail.php
http://www.coleyconsulting.co.uk/failure.htm and http://www.gantthead.com/content/articles/147229.cfm
http://www.it-cortex.com/Stat_Failure_Rate.htm and http://www.projectperfect.com.au/info_it_projects_fail.php
http://www.coleyconsulting.co.uk/failure.htm and http://www.gantthead.com/content/articles/147229.cfm
