When IT's Success Is A Flop Mon 21 Jul 08

Have you ever worked on a project where the information technology department did everything right yet the project was considered a failure?

What IT may consider a triumph may be a disaster according to, say, human resources. It all depends on perspective.

The world constantly presents IT with opportunities--new technologies, problems to solve and different ways to look at things. Of course, talk to the folks in human resources, sales, manufacturing and accounting, and they'll tell you their world is constantly changing too.

Even when faced with the same opportunities and challenges, each department's experiences and needs nudge them toward different outcomes or solutions. For example:

• IT sees the need for process and data.
• HR sees the need for training and change management.
• Accounting sees the "bottom line" and payback.
• Manufacturing sees the need for a variety of tools to help manage operations.
• Sales sees the need for analytics to provide information on customers, markets and sales trends.

Our different perspectives also influence how we judge a project's success. We in IT may think that the project was a success if we got the process and data right; HR may think the project is successful if the department had a good training program; and so on.

That means that a project in which IT does everything right--from IT's perspective--can nonetheless flop when measured along different axes. As with the five blind men in the old South Asian parable, we only get the true understanding of the elephant if we consider all perspectives.

A successful project depends on more than just programming and process design. We have to get all of the elements right: the training and change management, the usability, the reports--all of them.

Though this may seem obvious, we consistently see projects implemented without clear commitment to training and change management, without a clear definition of what the objective is, without clear understanding of what the next steps are.

Too often we fall prey to the "just get it done now" syndrome. The urgency of doing something overtakes the concept of doing it right. Shame on IT for allowing this to happen. I'm not suggesting "analysis paralysis," but, rather, that we encourage other departments to share ownership of the project and actively work with us in making it successful.

Sometimes we in IT exacerbate the problem by overestimating our understanding of the business, thinking we can do it better without the involvement of the business process owners. Giving a project to IT and walking away until it's completed just doesn't work. Sometimes it is better to not do a project than to implement one destined to fail.

If we engage with business owners and work with them in a true partnership, we can get the combined perspective to see the whole elephant. This goes beyond traditional requirements and represents a change for both IT and the business. To do this we need to try such things as:

• including other departments' resources and tasks in the project plan;
• having a business process owner as co-project manager along with the IT project manager;
• using metrics to measure how well business objectives are being achieved;
• and judging the project's success by the achievement of business objectives rather than by just whether it meets the go-live date.

What do you do to make sure that you view your projects from all perspectives?

This article is also posted on Forbes.com.  Feel free to join in the discussion either on this site or at Forbes.com

"The blinds are touching the elephant" photo by homo_sapiens

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