IT Project Management
According to The Standish Group, which researches Information Technology project management, only 29 percent of IT projects are successful. That's a mind-boggling statistic. Imagine if 71 percent of building construction projects fell down. What makes IT project management so difficult?
IT projects are exceptionally complex, for one thing. They involve complicated business processes, intricate hardware, software containing millions of lines of code, multiple service providers, and, of course, highly unpredictable end users.
An IT project doesn't just stand there, like a building. It does things, and anything that can be done can and will be done wrong. Walking on a building's floor does it no harm. But entering the wrong data into a database can blow the whole thing sky high, if the database IT project is not designed and built just right.
Planning is where most IT project management goes wrong, experts like The Standish Group agree. Rarely are enough time and resources spent at the very start of an IT project on the critical tasks of understanding how things are currently done; what changes need to be made to achieve the desired outcome; what hardware, software, and services are available and whether they work as advertised; and exactly how the changes will be made without bringing the whole IT infrastructure down.
"Haste makes waste" sums up the second major reason IT projects fail. Too often, higher management waits too long before authorizing an IT project, and then expects it to be completed in a rush. Nestle Corp. executives pushed through a complete replacement of the company's Enterprise Resource Planning system, over-confidently unplugging the old system before the new one was properly tested. Result: the new system crashed during the Halloween candy season, costing the company an estimated $700 million in lost sales.
Inadequate budgets lead to failure, too. IT project managers tend to lowball their budget needs in order to get approval for projects. But a Web server that cannot handle peak traffic loads can actually be worse than no Web server at all. If customers and employees find it slow and unreliable, they just won't use it and the company's reputation will be damaged for a very long time.
The general advice for IT project management is to allow three times as much planning time as you think you need, build and test small versions of the project many times instead of throwing the whole thing up at once, and over-build for your most optimistic traffic estimates.