Michael's Blog

One of my favorite movies of all time is Cool Hand Luke starring Paul Newman.  That movie has a famous line issued by the prison captain.  After trying several times to get Newman to conform to the prison life style that captain turns to his surrounding audience and utters the words to his surrounding audience; “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”

I have used these words with my own children many times but I wish I could use those words with clients when within the business technology consulting space.  Far too many times projects do not go as planned and it usually is because of a lack of communication.  That is why in any IT application development project it is imperative that each business unit that has a vested interest in a given project makes it clear exactly what they expect and what is needed.

Experience has taught me that merely stating what you need and what is expected is not enough, especially in the area of enterprise application development.  Each party or business unit needs an internal champion for its cause.  As any given project progress each business unit needs to make sure there is are checks and balances against their wants and needs list to determine how many of their stated needs are being met.  If they are not being met the project needs to stop temporarily until everyone that is involved with the project understand that needs and expectations are not being met and the team collectively need to make a decision on how and when to move forward.

They IT projects fail because there is a lack of planning, a lack of level-setting expectations and an overall lack of communication.  Must organizations understand this but more times than not they do not learn from past experience and move forward without consensus.  They are well into the user acceptance stage with the built in functionality asked for but for some reason the final approver says this is not what I asked for.

So what goes wrong with the 80% project failures, and what can we learn from this?  Several things occur on many levels! 

Let me list some of the reasons for project failure and actions that need to be taken
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• Consensus was not attained – it is apparent in most failed IT project that the approver and the business unit leaders have different, and at time conflicting, goals for the project.  Make sure there is “buy-in” along the path of development by everyone involved.
• Expectations are not managed – the approver wants one thing and the developers built something else base on the feedback of various business units.  Make sure you manage everyone’s expectations throughout the lifetime of the project
• Usually the final decision maker is excluded in most of the development meetings.  This is a very bad practice.  This responsible executive must be in on all major decision so there is no pushback at the end.

The lessons here are clear.  Identify the stake holders, come up with a communications plan, implement the plan and make sure there is communication and cooperation from each vested participant to ensure that your project does not fail.