Success always looks easy

March 13, 2012

With all the news about IT projects that go bad, you would think that we’d hear more news about projects that go well.  Then we could just copy down the “best practices” that led to the success and – voilà – our projects would come out perfectly every time.

But life is not so simple.  While we can enumerate key problems that led to failure by analyzing projects, it is much harder to point to one factor and say “this is what made this project successful.”  Success depends not only on avoiding the pitfalls, but also on bringing together all of the essential project elements.  Sometimes those elements are not so easy to identify.

Example 1:  I once struggled for 7 months with a project team that couldn’t seem to get all the right pieces together.  In fact, what was needed was to remove two members of the team.  One of them was in a key contributor position, but was just not disciplined enough to produce his part of the code (this was a firmware team).  The other was simply not contributing to the team because he didn’t understand his role and was not capable of fulfilling it.  While I had recommended the removal of these two on my 3rd day on the project, I had not insisted, and the result was a long slog.

What happens when you remove non-contributors from the team?  First of all, someone else on the team steps up to do what needs to be done.  Second of all, the whole team becomes more productive (and happy) because they are no longer saddled with the unproductive members.

Example 2: A client company launched a transition to Agile development methods in the development of a major sales-support package.  They hired an experienced team of software people and an Agile coach.  The program went well.  I was asked to assess the team and the project during its first year.  My assessment:  this team will do well no matter what methodology they use – because they are experienced people who know how to work in a team.

There was also an invisible success factor, invisible to the remote business people who chartered my assessment.  Within the ranks of IT management was an individual Director-level manager who secretly supported the Agile transition.  I say “secretly,” because the CIO turned out to be opposed to any special treatment of software developers (compared with, say, treatment of call-center operators), let alone “Agile” teams.  This manager quietly encouraged the Agile team and provided me with insight into all of the IT department politics that could affect the team’s performance.

If you manage to identify and engage the key success factors in real projects, you’ll be regarded as a genius.  But don’t let it go to your head, because a lot of it is luck.  Luck that is aided by keeping your eyes and your mind open.

If you’re managing a major project, it’s best to call upon resources (not just people, but information or equipment or software) that help compensate for any shortfall. So it’s a good idea to continually build up your network of contacts, your access to information, and your knowledge of available equipment and software.  Then, when you run into a roadblock, you can call on your network to help find what you need.  And of course, it doesn’t hurt to have a secret ally in the management ranks.

Filed Under: Agile Management, Painless IT Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Stranger ways to fail

February 29, 2012

In the last article, I gave three reasons for IT project failure.  These are not the only ways to fail!  In this article I describe failure modes I’ve seen that are much less conventional – and harder to overcome without serious dedication at the top.

Here are the three reasons from last time:

  1. They’re not defined well
  2. The people doing the work are not a team
  3. They don’t have enough resources or the right resources

And here are the new ones:

4.    Management is fighting over who controls the project

There’s nothing nastier in corporate politics than a turf battle.  All the best-intentioned platitudes about teamwork and customer-centricity are forgotten when there is a fight for power.  If these are happening in an organization near you, then you’re probably hunkered down, waiting for the chips to fall.  The project work is also probably way behind schedule and no one is willing to take any risks while the battles are fought.

These projects usually falter when the funding becomes uncertain because of the battles.  That of course leads to failure reason #3 above.

5.    The project has been chartered in order to show off a capability, rather than to accomplish a real, customer-oriented goal

A U.S.-based company I was working in asked me to manage a development project that was being done on the other side of the Atlantic.  Why?  I found out later it was simply because the former VP of Software was now in Europe and he wanted to show off the capability of the European software development team.  Although we managed to deliver the product and the team performed well, the product was not well received.  It was really unnecessary.

6.    Middle management is truly incompetent

A client company started development on a system that was way outside the company’s traditional area of expertise.  When the managers realized they needed an essential software component and asked for it, the development team showed them the component that they had already developed, because it made no sense to proceed without it.

This company’s first and second level managers were in over their heads with regard to the technology.  What made it worse is that the two levels of managers protected each other from showing their weakness to anyone above the second level.  Both the system and the company folded within a few years.

7.    The CEO and the executive staff don’t support the project because they don’t understand its significance.

A company I worked for was the first disruptor of markets for the big players in computer systems.  It offered systems that were an order of magnitude less costly than the competitors, and this not only opened up markets and applications that were new, it began to eat into the margins and the market share of the big players.

Twenty years later, other new companies began offering systems that were an order of magnitude less costly than this company’s systems.  The company couldn’t respond adequately because the top management did not understand how these “cheap” systems could do what the more costly ones did.  They also failed to grasp the significance of software as a business, separate from the “iron” of computer hardware.  The company ended by being acquired by one of the upstart disruptors.

If you can find your way to a safe place to proceed with your project, keep on trying to establish good practices and excellent communication.  And if you’re depending on successful completion of the project?  Then get clear about what’s going wrong, and get help.

Filed Under: Agile Management Tagged With: , , , , ,

Three causes of IT project failure

February 13, 2012

IT projects often don’t get done.  Not just done late, but not done at all.  Industry statistics show that over 50% of major IT projects are not regarded as successful. They get abandoned because they’re too late or because they’re so far over budget that the sponsors give up.  Many more deliver something, but not what the sponsors really want, and not on time within budget.

Why do these projects fail to complete? Here are three major causes of IT project failure.

1. They’re not defined well

If the sponsors don’t define the project well, the people implementing it will apply their own ideas to define the outcomes.  This usually leads the project astray, because no matter how technically competent the implementers are, they are not mind-readers and they rarely have a clear idea of the business purpose of the project.

The best way to define an IT project is to start with the end – defining the measurable impact on business parameters that the project is intended to have.  From these, derive criteria for completion including demonstrations of the key capabilities and measurable test results.  If this seems hard to do, then you need to review why the project is being done.

2. The people doing the work are not a team

People implementing the project need to behave as a team.  If they don’t, the project is likely to fail.

You need good teamwork to get a project done.  What’s good teamwork?  It’s good communication with blaming; it’s clear acceptance of accountability for doing what each member said he or she would do;  it’s working cooperatively to solve the inevitable problems that come up.

If your implementation team is split across town or across continents, there needs to be active management of the communications so that the teamwork criteria are met.  Agile development, which relies a lot on self-directed teams, requires outstanding teamwork before any benefit from the Agile principles will pay off.

For example, a client company I worked with had parts of its web implementation team split between two facilities 750 miles apart.  When not enough results were coming through, the manager decided that Agile methods would solve the problem.  But the two parts of the “team” did not trust each other and each blamed the other part for the lack of results.  Only after bringing the top dozen people together in one room for two days per month did they begin to work out their common goals and start to solve the problems.

Leadership is also required in a self-directed team.  Leadership in this context means actively managing the team process and the management.

3. They don’t have enough resources or the right resources

The effort needed to complete an IT project is often underestimated.  A combination of implementer optimism and wishful thinking on the part of the sponsor conspires to make the budget for many projects inadequate.  This causes an unpleasant surprise when the project is nowhere near complete when the budget is spent.

You also need the right resources.  People who have the skill and competence to plan, design, code, test and deploy the program are necessary.  If any part of this sequence is weak, then a lot of time and effort can be lost during the project.

The implementers need the right tools, including software tools and a work environment in which they can use them properly.

Under-estimation of the scope of a project may lead it to grow too big for a single team to accomplish within the time required.  That can lead to further complications, because multiple-team projects require segmentation of the effort into coherent modules, and then the integration of the whole project has to be done by an integration team.  So when you discover the realistic effort needed to accomplish the project, you may also have to rework the whole management structures used to implement it.

If you want to insulate your company from IT project failures, you need to pay attention to project definition, team formation and adequate resources.  Then you have a chance to beat the odds and reap a successful conclusion to your IT project.

Filed Under: Agile Management, Painless IT Tagged With: , , , ,

Software, software everywhere

January 23, 2012

Software is different from other technical stuff.  It’s abstract, invisible, and runs at extremely high speed.  So the people who are good at working with software tend to be different from “ordinary” engineers.  They have to be good at visualizing the abstract processes and the mathematical algorithms that make up the procedures implemented in software.

Software people are different, so their managers need to be able to deal with the difference.  Effective software managers know what’s critical to a well-functioning software team and those managers get good at providing it, even in the face of obstacles.

Obstacles come from upper management that doesn’t understand how software, and software people, is unique.  As a result, they assume that a manager who has skills in Operations can just as well manage software.

I’ve seen IT shops where the best software people left the company quickly after being treated as if they were call-center operators.  For example, the management assumed that the software people could be located anywhere in the building, that they didn’t need any special whiteboards to keep track of their project information.

Why should you care? After all, can’t you just hire the brains you need for software?  Well, not so fast.  You’re competing with every company in the world for the same kind of brains. Unless you’re in an entrepreneurial, fast growing, innovative company, software people will not prefer working for you over going to work in a more exciting environment.

IT is undergoing rapid change, primarily driven by the availability of cloud services.  But the cloud just moves the data centers to somewhere else. If you look closely at internal IT activities, you will realize that IT is itself a software-intensive activity.

This sounds self-evident, but it’s not a joke.  It’s a reality that many financial and operations executives fail to understand.  Everyone, from the business analysts to the website deployment people are not just software users – they have to understand software principles to do their work.

Business competition will come from new players, and from old players who master software tools and the business possibilities opened up by software.

As software becomes an integral part of business, there is a subtle shift in what management has to do and to know.  You now need staff – or consultants – who are knowledgeable about software and its workings.  And from them you need to learn what software means for the future of your business.

Is there something you’ve learned recently about software?  I welcome your comments.

Filed Under: Painless IT Tagged With: , , , , , ,

How can IT management fail to understand business goals?

January 10, 2012

“Now more than ever, IT must invest the time to understand specific business goals and translate IT metrics to reflect an impact against these business goals.  Often there is a gap between what IT reports and what is of interest to the business.”   — An Introductory Overview of ITIL V3, itSMF, 2007, p. 38

There’s been a lot written about how IT and business are misaligned.  See for example, Susan Cramm’s excellent book.[1]  But how do they get that way?  One cause is that many IT people don’t understand business.  Another is financial invisibility of IT due to budgeting processes.  But these are not the big killer causes.

I believe there are three major causes:  physical distance, psychological distance, and IT overload.

Physical distance of IT from the business leads to isolation in many ways.  One of my client companies had their IT people in a city 750 miles away from the home office.  Not only did this impose communication barriers, it meant that the IT people were living in a different culture from the home office people – even though both locations are in the United States.  Of course, when you add in the distance to some of the offshore contractors who are handling some IT services, physical distance means even more cultural distance.

Psychological distance can be caused by having objectives that don’t relate to business goals and by being managed in a “silo.”  For example, IT may report in to the CFO, and management metrics may relate only to financial performance.  As long as IT is budgeted as an operational expense, then no amount of encouragement will get IT managers to view what they’re doing as a strategic investment.  This can be aggravated by failing to include IT people in business planning.  Finally, I’ve seen IT organizations where the business tools used by the rest of the business are not in use in IT.

IT management overload is the third major cause of misalignment.  Beyond the usual overload caused by rapidly changing technology and shifting responsibilities (associated with Cloud services, for example), IT management is typically trying to do more with less budget.  As the pressure to perform increases, IT management concentrates on operational measures rather than business metrics.  In addition, technology shifts are raising the cost and complexity of legacy system support.  So IT managers tend to focus on reducing these burdens, rather than looking for new initiatives to support.

Where can we start to correct the lack of alignment between IT and business?  After addressing physical location and reporting structures, the most productive way to get alignment is with common metrics.  Look for business metrics that are relevant to concrete business results and are particularly dependent on IT service delivery.  Then make sure that IT managers understand the business metrics.  Finally, make sure that they buy in to being measured by these metrics.  To do that, of course, it is best to include them in business planning processes – and not just as number-providers.

What are your experiences with IT – Business alignment?  I welcome your comments.

[1] 8 Things We Hate About IT by Susan Cramm, Harvard Business Press, 2010 http://www.eighthates.com/

Filed Under: Painless IT Tagged With: , , , , , ,