The Root Cause of IT Project Failure

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.  Frank Zappa.

There exists anecdotal evidence that Information Technology (IT) projects fail at a greater rate than other types of projects.  Why is this?  Are we that bad at delivering projects?  Or is it that we’re that bad at planning?

Have you ever asked an artist to predict how long it will take to create a novel piece of art?  Or tried to get a marketing team to plan the schedule for coming up with the next campaign?  Why are we as IT teams so ready to come up with these precise, scientific – even optimistic – schedules?  What we do is often just as novel and just as creative.  But we’re ready to plunk down numbers on a schedule with the confidence of divine inspiration.

Project Management is a special kind of management.  That is, project management is the poster child of Management by Objectives (MBO).  The unique aspect of MBO – and thusly project management – is the objectives (milestones) with which are either tracking or off track.  To have objectives entails planning.  In project management, we call the objectives milestones and they are points on a (time or cost) schedule.

I want to distinguish here among varieties of projects.  Like the abstract water colorist who can knock out wilderness landscapes with the reliability of an assembly line, some shops do many very similar projects.  With those conditions your planning can get fairly precise.  It’s those other projects I’m talking about.  Not high risk, no, not those.  Rather, the high novelty projects.

Projects where you and the team have never really done anything like this before.  You’re breaking new ground and every design activity is a unique creative effort.

How can you say up front how long this will take or how much it will cost?  But we do.   And we commit to these numbers.  Why can’t we be like the artist or the marketer?  Why are they so much smarter than us when it comes to these commitments?  Is it because they’ve learned from their mistakes?

I assert that what we’re really predicting in our plans is not that it will take this long, but rather that it will take at least this long.  That it can’t realistically be done in less time.  And some of the engineering work can be planned.  For example, we can lay out that we will complete requirements in x days.  Or that development will take so many weeks.  But how long does it take to research alternatives?  How many prototypes will we have to do before we get it right?

IT projects – that is, novel IT projects – are just as creative as the artist carving the block of marble or the ad team brainstorming the perfect campaign.  And we should be just as resistant as those artists to committing too much (too little?) in advance.  We do ourselves, our team, and our stakeholders a disservice otherwise.

The root cause of IT project failure:  committing to a plan too early.  We don’t fail on delivery.  We fail trying to deliver to a faulty plan.

What happened when you promised when you should’ve waited?  What stories can you tell about trying to deliver to the wrong plan?

The Project Manager’s Cycle – Publish the Project Status Report

“Project status this week, in a nutshell, is that we are continuing to stay on schedule, but this is despite your team’s contribution.”  After the initial chit-chat, Srini intentionally opened the status meeting with a statement to get everyone’s attention, especially the Sponsor and Owner Jack.  “Our project team has been working around the delays of returning document reviews and approvals.  We’ve pretty much exhausted the continuing work, though.  As you can see on the status report, there are several deliverables over due for approval and the draft requirements document is held up.  If you think these durations will continue, then I recommend that we extend the time your team is allocated for these activities and extend the time line.”

With this post, we conclude documenting the activities in The Project Manager’s Cycle, the Monitoring and Controlling activities that the project manager performs each reporting cycle for the life of the project.  All of these activities (with the exception of the Client Project Meeting) build each week to the Project Status Report (PSR).  The PSR encapsulates all of the information the Sponsor/Client/Owner and all Stakeholders need into a compact package.

The PSR should document both the current status of the project (in summary) and progress since the last report.  The essential elements of the PSR include an Executive Summary, Accomplishments, Planned Accomplishments (in the next reporting period), Deliverable/Approval Status, Change Request Status, and Issues.  Accomplishments and Planned Accomplishments are reported relative to the plan (project management is the classic example of Management by Objectives).

Note that traffic lights (  Red,  Yellow,  Green) are not in my list of essential elements of the PSR.  I am ambivalent about them.  When used properly they are often valuable, but they are even more often used improperly.  If you use traffic lights, the meaning of each color must be defined clearly and all of the stakeholders reading the PSR must know what each color means.  Further, a single light is really not meaningful.  After all, the ultimate purpose of the lights is to show where external action is needed and one broad status doesn’t provide the specificity needed.  Rather, what I’ve seen that works best are lights representing Schedule, Scope, Budget, Resources, and Closure/Acceptance repeated for each project phase or (preferably) each deliverable.

The PSR is probably the most important document the PM produces and I can’t cover all of the nuances in one post, so expect to see more on other elements of the PSR in the future.

Do you have a project status report best practice to share?  How about a PSR disaster?