What are the changing dynamics of enterprise IT project and portfolio management that organizations are facing today? Let's look at the reasons some of the researches and findings point to understand current state of project delivery for enterprise IT projects: reasons of failure or success of these enterprise IT projects. We should also know 'why IT projects have become so crucial for enterprises these days?' And in subsequent posts in this series we will critical aspects that organizations should ensure for effective management and delivery of enterprise IT projects and portfolios.
Large IT projects have become make or break many enterprises. Don’t take it otherwise, I am not talking about success or failure or IT projects. The situation today is such that enterprises are heavily reliant on IT and survival, rather competitive advantage of enterprises depends on effectively leveraging IT for their businesses.
The business strategies are centered on IT driven marketing, sales, business operations, etc. If I were to make a statement: first generation of IT projects were meant to warm up organization to embrace larger change. And today, it has become indispensable for organizations to use IT for day to day operations, analyze dashboards, reports displayed by IT software. Strategic IT focus is crucial for many organizations to catch up with or be ahead of competition.
More than ever, a lot invested in IT projects today - money, time, resources as well as business interests. Large IT projects have been conventionally complex in terms of technological barriers, IT adoption, dispersed geo located teams of experts-users, stakeholder management and many other aspects. There has been plenty of survey and research findings that point to considerable failure rate of IT projects e.g. Portland Business Journals has concluded based on analysts’ survey that nearly 65-80% of IT projects fail to meet their objectives, run considerably late or overshoot the budgeted cost. Technology is not really the challenge in such projects, change in mindset to adopt new IT systems, resistance to embrace change is the real challenge.
We also have McKinsey&Co research about large scale IT projects that concluded not-so-good statistics of value delivered: About 45% of large IT projects overshoot budget, 7% overshoot timeline and more shockingly surveyed projects delivered 56% less value than desired.
Let me also share KPMG New Zealand report about project management survey 2013.
As a pre-cursor to our discussion about, effective management of large enterprise IT projects, let me quote few observations KPMG made regarding projects within high performing businesses
Now we have noted two ends of the continuum of projects-delivered. No organization would like to be on the other end of continuum where projects are failing, there is chaos, dissatisfaction & uncertainty prevail. No one would like to get counted in negative side of the project statistics.
So what can we do to move towards brighter side of the spectrum? To have a great start and consistently deliver desired value and possibly exceed expectations by delivering large enterprise IT projects?
Let’s look at seven aspects you will have to ensure for effectively managing enterprise IT Projects.
We will delve on each of these points in next post: why technical leadership and sound project management processes are important to ensure for Effectively Managing Enterprise IT Projects.