I recently had an interesting conversation with our IT manager, who wanted to know why many IT projects ended up as expensive 'white elephants', wasting prodigious amounts of money, yet delivering so little. We even managed to come up with a couple of approaches to the problem, of which more later.
These generally fall into the following broad categories:
Paul related two stories to me of two recent highly visible public sector failures - very large UK government IT projects that have failed or are failing. I pointed out that in my experience across a wide range of public and private sector clients in the last decade, the problems can occur anywhere - it's just that we get to read about the failures of our governments who are obliged to report to Parliament, while we are less likely to hear about the foibles of private companies.
Having said that, Paul, asked me for my opinion on the examples below. What went wrong, and how could we prevent these happening to our clients:
This failure is rather well summarised in a recent Daily Telegraph article in the Telegraph headlined Government IT projects fail because of politicians, not programmers where the author identified a host of reasons why this Home Office programme failed. Chief among them were that the requirements were not captured, and the project was planned on the basis of poor assumptions. For example:
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Borders for more detail.
From its inception in 2003 it was realised that this was a large and significant technology programme, quoted as "the world's biggest civil information technology programme".
In such a large and complex IT programme run over several years, it is impossible to isolate a single point of failure. Reservations were being raised as early as August 2005, and the programme was not cancelled in July 2011. However, two points are uncontestable:
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Connecting_for_Health for more detail.
When Paul and I got down to discussing what can be done, It's clear that there is no magic answer and expensive mistakes can happen to any company. However, there are ways to minimise the chances of your project becoming a 'white elephant'.
The online IT magazine 6 Strategies for Cancelling a Major IT Project raised a number of valid points for the IT project manager to consider, but at programme level there is a need for the business to ask itself hard questions.
There are many ways to achieve these two goals, primarily through:
These are often best conducted with the help of external experts - because it is often politically very painful to expose the failings of a project or programme.
Using the right tools and approaches, a project or programme can be restructured and set back on the path to success. As an expert in this aspect of project and programme management, we have helped many clients benefit from early interventions to ensure maximum return on investment in their projects and programmes.
If you would like to learn more about how CITI Limited could help you as partners to plan, deliver and sustain beneficial change, then please feel free to contact Richard Bateman on 01908 283600, email RBateman@citi.co.uk.