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06.07.05
How To Make Your IT Project A Success
 By Dr. Gerald M. Hoffman
For an IT project to be a success, it must meet three criteria:
1. it must be completed on time,
2. it must be completed within budget, and
3. it must provide the full functionality originally promised.
The IT profession has been conducting IT projects for over thirty
years. Yet about 75% of all IT projects fail to meet one or more
of these criteria. Why? The reasons IT projects fail are listed
below, more or less in the order of frequency of occurrence:
1. Inadequate or inaccurate specifications
2. Changing specifications
3. Insufficient user support
4. Bad estimates of required resources
5. Technical failure
6. Bad management of the project
At first glance it seems that if in IT project fails, it is the
fault of the IT department and the IT people. Without question this
is true some of the time. Technical failure is clearly an IT failure
most of the time. (Sometimes IT is forced to use questionable technology
by the rational demands of the competitive environment, or by irrational
demands by users to have the best and latest.) Bad project management
is also an IT failure much of the time. The IT community is aware
of these failings and is making substantial progress in correcting
them.
But there is more here than meets the eye. IT cannot do it alone.
Substantial participation by users is essential to the success of
every IT project.
Let's look at the role of users in a typical IT project in terms
of the specific tasks that need to be done in each phase of development.
· User requirements specification - Users should do most
of the work, with guidance about costs and technical issues from
IT.
· Functional design - Users should lead this effort, with
some participation by IT.
· Technical design - IT should lead this phase, with some
input from users, as technical considerations suggest or require
change in functional design. · Coding - No user participation
required.
· Testing - Users must design the test cases, provide the
test data and analyze the test results. This is a larger effort
than most people realize.
· Training and documentation - While IT must create the
technical documentation, user documentation of system functionality
is best done by users.
· Implementation - The users must work in parallel with
IT to install the new business processes required by every new system,
even as they train the ultimate users of the system.
There is almost no reliable data on how much user time is or should
be involved in these activities, but we in the IT community know
that the requirements are large. In an attempt to understand the
issue, I have conducted over 100 informal surveys of IT professionals
in the course of my teaching in the Northwestern University's Communications
Systems Strategy and Management program and in various other professional
programs and industry seminars.
The survey consists of just two questions. I set the stage this
way: "Think about a typical IT application development project
that is now under way or that you have recently completed, and answer
these two questions. Express your answer as the ratio of user work
days to IT work days."
Here are the questions and the range of answers I usually
receive:
1. How much user time should the project have had, as a percentage
of IT time? Answers typically range from 25% to 50%.
2. How much user time did the project actually get? Answers typically
range from 0% ("They told me to do it, and then disappeared
until it was done.") to 15%.
My analysis tells me that user work time in an application development
project should be from 25% to 100% of IT time, depending on the
nature of the project.
If this strikes you as too high, consider our collective experience
with comprehensive ERP systems a few years ago. These systems were
so large that they required dedicated task forces of users to support
their development. In many cases there were more users on the task
force than IT people. For the first time, companies were confronted
with the magnitude of user support required for major application
system development and deployment.
In no case has any CIO (of over 200 I have surveyed) ever said that
any project received as much user time as it required. The gap is
usually closed by IT people doing the users' work. This guarantees
project failure: · To the extent that IT people specify user
requirements and functional design, the new system and its associated
business processes reflect IT's view about how the business should
be run. This is a bad idea. · Users often change requirements
during the project, as they begin to understand the ramifications
of the new system, or as business needs change. · If the users
do not take the lead in the testing, the wrong things will be tested
using the wrong data - a guarantee of a difficult implementation and
needless maintenance costs. · When IT people write user documentation
it is often unintelligible to the users; when the users can understand
it, it often does not tell them what they need to know.
The overall effect of this transfer of work from users to IT is to
degrade performance with respect to all of the key criteria of success:
· Projects are late because IT has not allocated people to
do the work that users should be doing, delaying the IT work they
should be doing. Changing requirements magnify the problem. ·
Projects are over budget for the same reasons. · System functionally
is compromised because the IT people do not know as much about business
needs and business processes as the users know.
What's a manager to do? · If you the CEO or COO, do not
authorize any project unless the user commits in advance to providing
50% of the work days budgeted for IT participation. · If
you are the CIO, refuse to start a project without the user's commitment
to adequate user participation.
The biggest IT failure is failure to get the users do their jobs.
About the Author:
Dr. Gerald M. Hoffman is an Adjunct Professor, Northwestern
University. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of
Sinai Health System. Contact: Gerry@ghco.biz
© 2005 by Gerald M. Hoffman |
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