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11.29.06
Rules For Great IT Project Success
 By John Avellanet
Project delivery makes IT organizations credible. When IT "gets it right" at the project level, its ability to
impact the financial results of a company increases
and its leadership in providing strategic direction improves.
Good project delivery is the key to unlocking the door from the back-office to the boardroom.
And yet, according to a recent survey by Accenture, only 29% of IT projects are considered successful. The average cost overrun is 56%; the typical delay is 84%. After decades spent learning and implementing project management methodologies, measurements and controls, the success rate of IT projects is no better than when a single computer took up an entire room.
Now, despite the need for companies in the 21st century to innovatively embrace technology to compete, CIO's still find themselves hearing second-hand about their company's strategy while line-of-business executives embrace the "IT as a commodity" philosophy.
For IT to contribute to a company's bottom-line, IT executive teams need to ensure project alignment with business strategy. Projects, and particularly large-scale programs of multiple projects, need to be run flexibly, with an eye toward the larger business picture.
The following pages present six straightforward principles - culled from our experience with Fortune 100 companies, ten person firms, mid-sized businesses and not-for-profit organizations - to turn your project into a bottom-line success.
ONE: Use Occam's Razor
Big projects are seductive. They are also inherently risky, costly, complicated and come laden with poor track records.
William of Occam, a 14th century logician, wrote "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily." Albert Einstein restated this as "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." Apply their advice. Break up large projects into simpler, smaller projects or phases. Delineate each phase by its ability to provide an immediate and direct business benefit.
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the New IDC White Paper on the differences between traditional and operational
BI - Click Here |
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This approach has five benefits:
1. Requirements are simplified. With tighter constraints, requirements gathering quickly centers on the most crucial. Time-box the remainder as "nice-to-have." Done well, requirements will be easier to understand, have clear connections between them, and should be easier to complete.
2. A crystal clear focus is easily achieved when working on smaller, simpler phases.
3. A succession of success can be built by rapidly delivering smaller project phases for people to easily see what they are getting for their money, time and effort.
4. Smaller phases are simpler to manage, perform quality and compliance checks on, fix, tweak or debug, and modify as environmental factors demand.
5. Phased projects are more easily paused (or halted altogether) as business conditions change. Personnel can then quickly pick up other activities.
Click here to continue reading this article.
About
the Author:
John Avellanet is the managing director & principal consultant of Cerulean Associates LLC, a Virginia-based IT management & compliance consultancy focused on helping clients improve their bottom-line results with project assurance, program management, and IT and compliance strategies aligned with business initiatives.
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