Successful IT Project Management

Survey’s show that over 60% of IT projects fail. Failure can refer to numerous things; going over budget, beyond schedule, or not meeting the requirements of the business. Another survey (http://www.genecaresearchreports.com/) asked business and IT professionals their perspective on IT projects and found that 75% felt development projects would either always or usually fail, 78% said they felt the business is usually or always “out of sync” with project requirements, and 80% responded they felt at least 50% of the time during a project is spent on rework. These statistics represent a tremendous amount of wasted time, money, and resources.

What causes projects to fail? Often, this comes down to weak processes, structure, and project management. In this article, we’ll explore the top areas to focus efforts and evaluate how strong project management and adherence to a methodology can dramatically improve project success.

Before exploring opportunities for improvement, it is important to take a deeper look at what defines success. Traditionally, the constraints triangle has set the standard for defining project success with scope, schedule, and budget. Companies are now realizing that the traditional metrics don’t reflect all important success criteria. The project’s overall impact to the business, how effectively it solves the organization’s needs, and the general perception of the project define true project success.


#1 – Business vs. IT Projects
Think in a larger scope for your projects. An IT project is designed to implement a system with a very narrow scope. Focusing solely on IT requirements may ignore the true metrics for success within the overall organization, causing the project to fail in the eyes of the business. A business project, however, is designed to solve an organizational problem. This approach brings together the appropriate expertise from throughout the organization, gains top management buy in, and ties goals and metrics back to business needs. The broad perspective approach of a business project is an underlying theme within all areas of improving project management.


#2 – Proper Planning
Perhaps one of the most common, and most obvious types of project failures arises from poor planning. Before a project can begin, there must be careful planning to ensure the solution solves the business problem. This involves carefully understanding the needs, business drivers, success criteria, stakeholder impact, and numerous other factors related to the environment, organization, and situation. It is critical to have a clear view of where you are heading and the full problem.

A less obvious planning concern is around over-planning. There is a balance that must be identified between identifying enough details to ensure you are moving in the proper direction and taking proper steps, while not fully documenting and exploring every possible detail. Over-planning can result in budget and schedule overrun before the first piece of code is ever written.


#3 – Poor Team
A major cause of project failure is having a poor team. This could involve the most obvious issues – such as a team that doesn’t have the skillset or skill level to complete the work at the needed level of quality, or a team that doesn’t communicate or work well together. Thinking of the team in a broader sense as all who have influence over the project – those actually completing the work, the business leaders, the project manager, the executive stakeholders, etc. – shows there are a lot of areas for breakdowns and failures. All team members and stakeholders must be operating effectively, communicating appropriately, possessing the necessary skills, aligned with the business goals and needs, and motivated to reach the same goals in order for a team to be high performing. Organizing a high performing team is both an art and science, requires significant attention and work by all involved, and can be very challenging to obtain.


#4 –Stakeholder Management
Stakeholders are a critical component of any project, and it is important to carefully manage the interactions and information distribution with stakeholders. Failure to properly understand, manage, and engage stakeholders can result in poor adoption, lack of needed support, poor perception, and confusion. Stakeholders should be properly identified and categorized based on level of interest and influence over the project. Projects should be operated in a highly transparent manner allowing stakeholders visibility in the process, progress, and results, with expectations carefully aligned with the project’s objectives.


#5 - Breaking Down Projects Into Smaller Pieces
A business principle called the “Cone of Uncertainty” demonstrates that the level of risk in a plan increases exponentially as you move further out in time. While you may be fairly certain what development efforts lie before you over the next few days, as you start to look further beyond into months or even years, the degree of uncertainty caused by positive or negative influencing factors becomes great, increasing the level of risk that you won’t be operating on plan. So, why plan so far in advance? Break projects up into the smallest pieces possible to allow operation with the most predictable variables and provide timelines with more certainty and less risk.


#6 - Managing Risks
Risks are a part of every project that can yield significant positive or negative impact. It is critical to proactively manage risks by identifying leading risks by likelihood and impact, and determining a strategy of mitigate, transfer, avoid, or accept. Obviously, you’ll never be able to identify all possible risk scenarios, but, you’ll find projects progress much more effectively when you are actively looking for, and managing, those risks that become apparent. Risk management is an art form that is learned over time.


#7 – Scope Creep
For anyone that has worked with software development long, “scope creep” is a very familiar concept. Often changes appear to be quick to implement, and are made without following formalized scope management policies. These changes, however, add up to significant additional work over time. With no tracking, it can be easy to suddenly be behind schedule and over budget without realizing the cause was a series of small changes. A rigid change management system is imperative. Document the initial intended functionality and scope of the project, and when something arises that is different, identify that it is a scope change, and identify the impact to schedule and budget. It is common that stakeholders don’t realize the impact these changes might have, so, highlighting the change and its impact can help keep the project on track. It is also important to realize the scope creep does not only come from outside of the team. The development team itself, as well as project manager, are just as likely to see opportunities to improve the product and add these “quick” changes to scope.


#8 – Rigidity
At first glance, identifying rigidity as a failure point seems counter-intuitive from the previous point of the necessity of change management. The opposite is actually true – change in a project is not a bad thing and it should be embraced. It is critically important to understand and manage change, but changes to make the product better, better serve the customer, or create additional value should certainly be acted upon if possible. Often times projects fail to deliver the intended value to the business because they stick to the planning that was completed a year or more earlier during the planning phases. Remember, a project delivered on time, in budget, and within scope is still a failure if it doesn’t bring value to the organization. Be open to changes that improve the project or keep it aligned with the business.

While projects can fail for countless reasons, the above listed eight project failure reasons highlight some of the leading causes. The common theme through each of these items is the need for strong project management and leadership skills, adherence to a project methodology, and close alignment between business and technology. With a focus on these areas, projects stand a much greater chance of success.