Top Down Accountability For IT Project Success

So how can we manage C-level executives of organizations before their next IT Projects commence?

Specifically, they need to be kept fully accountable for their initial input and project decisions that they make *before* the project commences. This is because these are the critical investment and pre-implementation decisions that will drive subsequent business processes for these IT projects.

As HP CEO, Mark Hurd, went on to say about the job of the CEO: "At the end of the day, [the CEO has] gotta get this part [business processes] of the business right to be able to align IT throughout the company. It's no different than aligning your sales organization, aligning your R&D, aligning any other piece of it."

Rather than letting CEO’s and Chief executives lay the early foundations for IT project failures (through poorly made, unfounded and unaccountable decisions), organizations needs to manage and delegate upwards. This will prevent them sitting back while their minions, who actually execute the project, take the fall for what they could have prevented at the projects outset. By making better decisions and hence ensuring robust project processes,  accountability of all executive strategic project decisions will be assured.

A point that James Taylor makes in his article, “Make Better Decisions”, is that organizations, and especially senior executives, should conduct some form of decision making discovery. This is a critical issue that I support and one that I believe should predominantly also include C-level executives.

Even the best Project Managers and project management tools, cannot ensure the success of a project if the initial strategic investment and project decisions made by C-level and senior executives are poor, devoid of input, lack hard facts and where the executives making them are not held accountable.

Critical project discipline decisions, as outlined below, all result in the development of important pre-project planning and business processes. If these decisions are delegated, glossed over or taken without sufficient collaboration and input from the *appropriate* parties, then the supporting business processes will thereby also lack substance.

    * Communications
    * Requirements gathering
    * Stakeholder support and involvement
    * Management support
    * User support and involvement
    * Strategy alignment
    * Success and Progress Metrics
    * IT Risk and Governance
    * Solution and Vendor Selection
    * Change Management
    * Training and development

Each of these strategic project disciplines and business process decisions should be orchestrated at the top of the organization by the CEO and C-level executives. In order that these disciplines don't become "Reasons for Failure", critical decisions about "Who" and "How" to execute and manage each discipline must be made at the top of the organization.

Because many of these disciplines and business processes are already incumbent within organizations, a general blaze attitude to addressing them can become prevalent. For this reason, C-level executives unfortunately often abdicate any responsibility for making these discipline decisions, thereby removing most of their accountability.

This may all seem a bit harsh, however I have rarely (if ever) seen any CEO or C-level executive become a scapegoat for a failed IT Project - (other than the unfortunate CIO).

Kind regards

Sarah

IT Project Failure - The Root Causes behind every Reason for IT Project Failure

Simply put, IT projects fail not because of what we do, but because of what we haven’t done!

Conventional wisdom suggests that we can identify a set of reasons for project failures post implementation. As Michael Krigsman highlighted in his blog "Six types of IT project failure", classifying the reasons for failure can often illuminate Root Cause for project failure. However, in my opinion by simply categorizing failures often leads organizations to incorrectly believe that there were only one or two aspects of their project that caused it to fail.

My research has identified that the genesis of project failures is in fact an organization's pre-implementation strategic decision making (or lack thereof). The symptoms or reasons for the failure are easily classified but the root cause is often buried because it becomes almost impossible to unravel the causes after a protracted period once the project has failed.

Furthermore, I have found that simply identifying reasons for IT project failures can in itself lead to "Scapegoating" of the parties that were responsible for that element of the project (e.g. the Project Sponsor, Vendor or Project Manager ).

In the case of the Project Sponsor, mentioned in Michael Krigsmans blog, they need to be given the authority and accountability to make project decisions otherwise they will not remain actively and positively involved in the project. If they are not actively involved (with skin in the game), then they are just the "Go To” person, (which can be a pretty unenviable and arduous position to be in). This is just one example (not assigning accountability) of how poor strategic decision making by the organization before the project is initiated puts IT projects at risk.
 
"Failure is not a single, cataclysmic event. You don't fail overnight. Instead, failure is a few errors in judgment, repeated every day" Jim Rohn.

More often than not, what I have found is that the "Root Cause" is generally embedded in the organization as an underlying and fundamental flaw in its pre-investment strategic planning and pre-implementation strategic decision making processes.

These are executive decisions that provide the strategy for How the project will commence and What and Who needs to be included or involved.

Many of the reasons for IT project failures that I have identified, and that Mike Kavis has covered extensively, can be eliminated by addressing these key strategic decisions at the outset of a project, because the potential Root Cause will thereby be identified and addressed before the project has even begun.

Kind Regards
Sarah Jane Runge

Taking the risk out of IT Risk and Governance

,Do IT Risk and Governance measures really help organizations to avoid IT Project failures?

To coin a phrase used by a fellow Twitterer “No process at all is better than a bad process”.

So how many resources, either dollars or human, do organizations invest in establishing IT risk and Governance frameworks? How much time is spent administering, managing and monitoring these processes and what is an organization’s ROI for their IT governance investment?

For all of the above, most organizations would probably respond “Too much”!

It is surprising to find that many large organizations and government bodies that claim to have or would be required by stakeholders to have stringent IT Risk and Governance frameworks still have rogue, run-away or failed IT projects. The following are some of the many examples of organizations and government bodies who experienced the chaos of rogue IT projects:

• The USA Census bureau $2bn in IT project overruns for a project that will probably need to be scrapped!

• Avis Car rental –Europe ERP Project - €45m IT failure as ERP Project is cancelled.

• Melbourne Transportation Authority Australia – Myki project$1bn later and 18 months behind schedule delivering Project “Myki”

• Australian Ports – Integrated Cargo system$217bn cost blowout for a system that still does not work to the extent it was intended to.

• FBI - VCF project $170m for an IT project that had to be cancelled

• Sydney Water – CIBS project estimated $97m blowout and lengthy delays for a project that was scrapped

If an organization’s IT risk umbrella covers IT governance with a comprehensive IT risk portfolio, then how do organizations still get lumbered with runaway and failed IT Projects?

An underlying cause is that IT Risk and Governance frameworks are focused almost exclusively on the “tangibles” of the organization and the direct outcomes of projects giving insufficient attention to the important “soft” intangibles of their organization. This is most critical at the crucial “pre-investment” IT decision making and process planning phase when identifying and determining how to achieve these project outcomes needs to take place.

IT governance will take into account the amount of human and financial resources required for the project and an IT risk portfolio will monitor IT projects, IT service continuity, service providers, information assets, new and emergent technologies, software applications and infrastructure to ensure they are integrated with management, the business benefits and their alignment with strategy.

As critical as these governance and risk measures are to the success of an IT Project, they will fail to deliver if left to act in isolation. Simply put, IT risk and governance measures do not address the internal psycho-analytical aspects of an organization, including its decision making process. Nor do they analyze the “What”, “Why”, “Who”, “When” “Where” and “How” decisions needed in investing in or undertaking IT projects.

These key decisions are fundamental to organizations in determining whether projects will succeed or not and are the foundations and key drivers for determining IT project success. They must therefore be diligently made by C-level executives and senior management *before* projects commence.

In short, all of these key decisions are uncovered and addressed when applying Corporate Profiling to an organization before initiating an IT Project.

Indeed, Corporate Profiling can assist organizations in achieving their expected ROI and other benefits from their IT and Risk Governance processes in delivering IT projects.

“Nothing and nobody fails as badly as when undertaking something that someone else has failed to plan” (Sarah Jane Runge).

Kind regards
Sarah Jane Runge