Why do IT projects fail?
Posted by Elizabeth
Hiscox, a specialist insurer with a UK technology underwriting practice, has identified five reasons why IT projects fail, and actually they are not the reasons you might think.
Here are what their experts came up with as the top reasons that technology projects don’t complete successfully:
Work starts too soon
We’ve all been there: the project sponsor or key customer who is desperate for work to start on their project before everything is properly scoped out. The due diligence phase is important. Project managers should push for all the upfront negotiations and planning to be nearing completion before any ‘real’ work starts. Otherwise you risk adding time to the project in the long run as you will have missed out contractual clauses and requirements.
Contracts are ambiguous
If the contract does not clarify exactly what is required, you can run into trouble later. Of course, you don’t want to be referring to the contract before every phone call with your supplier as that doesn’t exactly engender trust in the relationship. However, you do want to make sure that there is clarity in what has been agreed.
Contracts are broken
The contract is there to help you, so when one party no longer adheres to what the contract says things are bound to go wrong. You can always amend a contract, for example, if the scope of the project changes and you require the supplier to carry out more work. But do it through proper change controls, with analysis of the required changes and have everyone sign up to the changes. This is especially important as changes can have knock on implications for other parts of the contract. You aren’t just changing project scope, you are changing project budget and resources as well.
Work isn’t estimated adequately
This is another symptom of rushing the early project phases. A failure to scope out the work adequately at the start of the project will lead to underestimating how long things are likely to take. Technology projects are complex, and the estimates should reflect that. Unfortunately, complexity usually adds cost, so suppliers might want to play down the impact that complex requirements will have on the budget and resources. Make sure the right people are involved in the estimation process – don’t leave it up to the sales team!
Lack of engagement
Well, this one won’t come as a surprise. Projects fail because people aren’t bought in to the objectives and outcomes. The supplier and the project team need to work closely together to get a satisfactory project delivery. And they both need to involve the end users, preferably as early as possible. Project communications plays a part here. Unsurprisingly, projects do better if the right people are involved.
These issues were discussed at a recent Computer Weekly round table and Computer Weekly reported this week (in the print magazine) that there was consensus amongst the participants that good project management skills can help address all these issues. They also agreed that having the right people involved was far more important than the technology or processes that the project was trying to deliver. So you have to ask, when we know all this why are IT projects still failing?
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