Working in the high-tech industry, I can certainty appreciate the potential value of technology. However, I wonder if leaders and project managers are placing too much hope in technology to solve problems that are related to people, process, and alignment. It is like a golfer, buying slice-compensating clubs to fix a bad swing.

Over the past 18+ years, I have personally worked on dozens of projects, advised, and consulted many dozens more. In most cases, projects struggled to deliver tangible value to the business. Too often, stakeholders and users end up with pretty much the same as what they had before – only different. A study by McKinsey &Company and the University of Oxford(1), showed that large scale IT projects deliver less than 44% of promised value, and 50% of projects run massively over budget, and schedule.

The biggest challenge facing projects are related to people, not technology. A survey conducted by Forester Research(2) confirmed that the most important factors to project success are: understanding stakeholders’ priorities (40%), aligning processes (44%) and managing change (42%). Technology plays a relatively minor part.

In many projects however, most of the resources and efforts are spent on technology and implementation. Which is not surprising when a Geneca Research(3) survey reports that 75% of project teams do not have clear understanding of business objectives and are out-of-sync with stakeholders. How can companies expect to get value from projects, when project teams do not have clear understandings of stakeholders’ priorities and pains?

Just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, value is in the eye of the stakeholders. If project sponsors want to get the most out of their investments, and project managers want to deliver value to stakeholders, then you should have clear answers to the following questions:

• Who are the stakeholders?
• What are they trying to achieve?
• How do they plan to achieve them?
• What challenges/pains are preventing them from executing their plans?
• How will the project remove pains and enable execution?
• How will success be measured?

If sponsors and project teams do not have clear answers to the above questions, I think they would be well served to take a step back and get clarity before putting more money on the table. Because statistically, without a clear understanding the above questions, there is a 75%(3) chance that the money spent will not generate the result hoped for.

But then again; I can certainly relate with golfers with bad swings — it is so much fun and exciting imagining how a new set of clubs will improve the next round. 🙂

 

*References:

1. McKinsey & Company in conjunction with University of Oxford (October 2012) :  “Delivering large-scale IT projects on time, on budget, and on value”
2. Forrester Research (June 2013): “Future of CRM: Defining The Critical Success Factors”
3. Geneca Research  (2011): “Doomed from the start – Why The Majority of Business and IT Teams Anticipate Their Software Development Projects Will Fail”