Is project failure all about business perceptions?

The gap between IT managers' and non-IT managers' perceptions of project success rates has widened, showing no respect to timeliness and budgets.

That is according to IDC's second annual Getting I.T. Right Survey, designed to measure IT performance in New Zealand, which sought to retest the theory that there was a misalignment of IT to business strategy within New Zealand organisations.

Whilst there were some areas of improvement in 2012, in many instances the misalignment gap has increased between IT management and non-IT management.

"Project success is all about managing perceptions," says Louise Francis, Research Manager, IDC New Zealand.

"The more complex the project, the more critical it is to understand stakeholder attitudes and motivations during all stages of the IT project from planning to post implementation support.

"The impact of poor requirements gathering is often a major factor in IT project failure, hampering effective lines of communication throughout the project through business irrelevance that which can doom a project right from the start."

Key factors identified by IDC as contributing to this persistent gap and project failures include:

• Inadequate project prioritisation and selection processes: To get the budget approval for a project, IT managers often need to commit to a concrete deadline. This inflexibility increases the likelihood of the implementation not meeting the requirement for project timeliness.

• Changing scope during the project: Changes to the original project brief, however minor, generally have a compounding effect on deadlines as the consequences ripple through the entire project timeline and resource availability. The bigger the project, the bigger the ripple.

• A lack of transparency beyond the IT management level: A lack of visibility into IT projects can obscure progress on success factors at the non-IT management level. Project managers often underestimate the importance of defining and clearly communicating risk factors, particularly in large critical projects.

• Insufficient executive involvement in IT project governance: Successful projects require strong executive involvement and sponsorship. If executives believe that they are being excluded from the projects that directly affect their business it will be difficult for these stakeholders to objectively evaluate the success of projects.

• Vagueness of the businesses' expected needs or project outcomes: In the survey 60% of line of business managers stated that they were only sometimes or never consulted for IT projects affecting their department. This can lead to a lack of clearly defined and mutually agreed success factors, particularly in complex projects.

• No formalised mechanism for capturing and analysing end-user satisfaction with IT service delivery: End-user satisfaction is the bottom line success factor in IT projects. Without a formalised mechanism or process for capturing and analysing end-user satisfaction attitudes there is a danger of IT repeating the mistakes of the past and leading to a dangerous situation where "shadow" IT becomes irretrievably entrenched within the organisation.

"The more research we do, the more we find out that there are answers to the “how can we improve IT” question out there and often people know about them, but just aren’t applying them,” says Scott Groombridge, Getting I.T. Right Founder.

“How to improve IT is not a technical problem to solve but a management one, people aren’t being held accountable for delivering their elements of the strategic plan according to their position in the organisational structure.

"For example, the CEO should be accountable for leading everyone to the strategic plan, and the GMs should be active sponsors and stakeholders in achieving the plan.

“IT is usually stuck between a rock and a hard place as it has a relatively low percentage of the annual budget and is treated as such, but has an integral role in keeping a company functioning.

"It would be great to see it treated with a higher level of importance by the exec teams.”

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