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By Info-Tech Research Group

Many enterprises are plagued with underperforming IT projects. Info-Tech collected surveys from almost 2,000 respondents representing companies of all sizes from a variety of different industries. The respondents provided information on their experiences with major IT projects such as VoIP, Virtualization, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and Business Intelligence (BI). Info-Tech also collected data on the success of these projects in terms of business benefits, competitive advantage, alignment with budget, and success in meeting timelines. These metrics were combined to establish an overall project success score and determine best practices.

Key Findings

The statistical findings were analyzed to assess their causes and the implications for Project Management processes. Key findings include the following:

• Involving the hardware vendor is a key differentiator for both application (e.g. ERP, BI, CRM) and infrastructure projects (e.g. VoIP). Vendor involvement is, however, a negative in virtualization projects as hardware vendors are a risk for defining the product/service need. Two types of benefits generally emerge from vendor involvement:
• Appropriate capacity. Application projects often have poorly scoped hardware requirements. Involving the internal infrastructure team, and in turn the hardware and software vendors, provides some guidance on the scalability and reliability issues that application architects may overlook. This problem is particularly important in large scale projects such as BI and ERP projects.
• Product selection. Hardware vendors can provide guidance on related solution types. A Storage Area Network (SAN) vendor, for example, can provide guidance on tape backup systems. The ease of integration for these technologies may yield positive project outcomes such as improved on-time performance.
• Functional management and senior management support plays a key role. Management has an important role in successful projects, while relying totally on management for final product selection, however, is characteristic of underperforming projects. Final product selection should involve all project stakeholders, including IT. This problem is particularly prevalent with CRM projects. Senior management's input is crucial in projects such as VoIP (due to its enterprise-wide impact) and BI (due to reporting objectives and metrics). Document management project success, especially, requires extensive involvement of business unit management to establish and define the business need.
• End-user involvement lends a hand. A leading differentiator between successful and unsuccessful projects is the involvement of the end-user. End-users are important contributors to the process of defining specific requirements and planning effective deployment. End-user involvement is considerably less important for infrastructure projects like storage consolidation or virtualization.

Key Questions to Ask

There are a number of key questions that managers should use to evaluate their current IT projects. These questions serve as a diagnostic for the most significant project problems:

• Include the hardware vendor.
• Has the project team consulted with hardware vendors? If not, the team should do so, either directly or through the internal infrastructure team, in order to ensure all of the facts have been collected and considered.
• Has the project team clearly defined the hardware requirements for the project? If not, the team should verify required server and storage capacity with the selected software and hardware vendor.
• Has the project team determined if there are suitable options within the product families of current technology providers? If not, the project must incorporate the selection and deployment of new technology.
• Evaluate the role of management.
• Do senior managers carry sole responsibility for product selection? IT must be involved in software selection to ensure supportability and compatibility with existing applications and technology.
• Is senior management involved in projects related to core operations such as systems for financial management or business reporting? If not, their involvement should be enforced by having them sign-off on specifications.
• Is senior management involved in projects that have a broad impact footprint in the enterprise? If not, the project should be deferred until serious management involvement is demonstrated.
• Consider the role of end-users.
• Do end-users select products? End users may not understand technical requirements and may not have done adequate research.
• Are users over-burdened with the responsibility of drafting formal requirements or functional specifications? Generally, IT must collect requirements and document specifications in order to ensure a comprehensive specification.
• Are users involved in the requirements definition phase of application projects? Involvement will improve results and ensure the project goals align with true user requirements.