Why IT projects fail
I saw this item a while back saying that a recent Gartner study predicts that by 2008, 90% of all organizations will fail in their first attempt at data governance.Of course first attempts at data governance, compliance and risk management fail - it's been a fact of life for a long time that organizations find it difficult and expensive to assimilate new information technologies because of the complexities of the components and systems in the networked, distributed computing environment. Success with these technologies seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Back in the late 90s - Gartner estimated that less than 50% of projects under $750K ever succeed - the stats are not getting better.
Here are 5 reasons you will fail in your next application development, data governance, compliance, IT governance or risk management or custom application software development project:
1. Using proprietary / closed source software
If you use proprietary closed source software, you will have difficulty knowing if a given vendor's product even works let alone be sure that you can confidently roll it out in production in a scalable fashion. Ask the vendor for a phone number of a live customer that runs the product with 10x more users and transaction traffic than you need at the moment. If you get a number, make the call.
2. Under-estimating the challenges of system integration
After corporate IT took some infrastructure decisions, now you have to develop, integrate and manage the different technologies for server, client, network, security, GUI, reliability, scalability etc. Enterprise risk management projects can be the valley of death for system integrators.
3. Accepting a project schedule doomed to failure
Because of pressures to introduce products quickly and comply with external regulation by some arbitrary data (the mantra of time to market and not time to quality); many software tool and application vendors release buggy and immature products and at a rate faster than customers can match.
4. BLTB – Blind leading the blind syndrome
Many IT infrastructure and product decisions are taken without inputs from developers and technical people who actually have had real-world experience with the product. For example - a strategic decision to install a particular RDBMS product is forged between a sales person who knows nothing about SQL selling to a manager who read a report in Gartner.
5. OMS - over-management syndrome
Many organizations often turn to outsourcing companies for new applications and technology migration. The customer and contractor often have OMS - “Over-management syndrome”. A customer we know recently contracted with a large systems integrator for a small prototype in Visual Basic that would illustrate proof of concept. The System integrator assigned an account manager, a project manager, and a human factors manager who managed the two people actually doing the work ; a GUI designer who was a contractor to the SI and a VB coder with 2 years experience. This was a Kafkaesque example of an OMS afflicted organization with BLTB afflicted management supervising mediocre staff.
