Improving Project Management and The Total CIO

IT projects are notorious for coming in late, over cost, and not meeting the customer’s needs.

CIO.com has an excellent article on ways to improve project management in an article entitled, “When Failure is Not an Option,” by Meredith Levinson (3 July 2008).

For organizations, good project management is a critical success factor!

“Project management is the number-one success factor for getting anything done in the organization. A firm’s ability to execute its strategy lies with its ability to manage projects,” according to Sam Lawler, the director of GlassHouse Technologies’ project management practice.

Yet, for years, organizations have faulted CIOs and IT departments with failed IT projects. As recently as 2004, a study by The Standish Group found that only 29% of IT projects “were completed on time, on budget, and with all features and functions originally specified.”

Project management methodologies work when business and IT work together as a team.

There are various methodologies being employed to try to improve project’s success, such as PMBOK and ITIL. However, IT projects’ success depends on IT and business people working together to achieve results; if this partnership and collaboration doesn’t happen, then no PM framework will bring us the project success we desire. Our organization’s business people are critical to ensuring project success—they develop the business case, identify requirements/functional specifications, realign and improve business processes, and test technical solutions to ensure they meet mission and business needs.

No longer is it about tossing the proverbial hot potato to IT and then pointing fingers and assigning blame when something doesn’t work right. Instead, the business and IT people are on the same team, sharing accountability, and working toward the success of the project and the enterprise.

Performance measurement is a must:

Improved project management needs to be accompanied by measurement of project success and reporting on these to executive management. We can’t manage what we don’t measure. And we need transparency to senior management to ensure that everyone—business and IT—have “skin in the game.”

Further, there are trade-offs in project management between cost, schedule, and scope/performance. Changing one affects the others, so we need to manage projects harmoniously in this triad. If for example, a project is delayed or costs more, but delivers on added functionality requested by the business, then the project can still be a success. At the end of the project, success is defined by the business!

Improving Project Management and The Total CIO

IT Governance –Value Creation and Accountability

IT governance is something people tend to have a love/hate relationship with. They love it because they know they need it and will benefit from it; but they hate it because they don’t want to do it and be bound by it.

It sort of reminds me of the old TV show, The Little Rascals, when the mother “makes” her kid take the spoonful of awful tasting castor oil because it was good for him. And what a face the kid would make as that spoon glided into his mouth, and then a big smile would emerge.

DM Review, 8 February 2008, reports that enterprises are “Getting Serious about IT Governance.”

Here’s why IT governance is growing in importance:

1. Growing IT expenditures—“Worldwide IT spending has grown 5 percent to 8 percent in recent years and will approach $3 trillion for 2007”
2. IT project troubles—“IT project failures, security breaches, and compliance snafus are still abundant. Gartner estimated that more than $600 billion has been squandered on ill-conceived or poorly executed projects. And according to Standish Group, only 30 percent of projects are considered successful.”
3. Money won’t solve the problem—“Simply pouring more money into IT won’t necessarily fix a company’s problems or mitigate its risks.”

IT governance is a two-fold endeavor:

1. Value creation—“IT governance is about balancing the interests of investors and stakeholders by focusing resources on the creation of value…if the mission of IT is to provide systems the business wants, it is equally important to provide systems the business actually needs.”
2. Accountability—“IT governance is the system by which IT is directed and controlled. It should address the roles and responsibilities of groups and individuals…articulate the rules and procedures for making IT decisions, and provide a structure through which IT objectives are set, attained, and monitored.”

In the Federal IT Investment Management (ITIM) process for Capital Planning and Investment Control, value creation and accountability align well with the phases of Select-Control-Evaluate for IT investments.

• The Select phase supports value creation. It involves the selection of projects based on a combination of the following factors: alignment with mission/business strategy, highest return on investment, lowest risk, and alignment to and compliance with the enterprise architecture.
• The Control phase supports accountability. It involves monitoring and managing IT projects for cost, schedule, and performance parameters. Projects that deviate from their targets risk being reorganized, downsized, or entirely phased out.
• The Evaluate phase supports both value creation and accountability. It is the evaluation of whether IT projects meet their intended performance goals. This provides lessons learned for future IT project selections and for controlling their steady progress, as well as holding accountable the project sponsor and team for their IT project.

IT Governance –Value Creation and Accountability

Shooting the Messenger and Enterprise Architecture

The Wall Street Journal, 11 September 2007 reports that the “everyone knows blaming the blameless bearer of bad news doesn’t help, but we do it anyway. It’s…the gulf between knowing a problem and solving it.”

The article continues, “Big bureaucracies are set up to place human barriers around decision makers. Today there’s the added protection of automated phones and web sites that bury contact information for real people. So the buck stops in the lower rungs of the hierarchy.”

“The government agency…sent lower level staffers to break news to clients that they didn’t get approved…’the true irony of the situation is sending in someone who is less qualified to address a hostile situation, and that creates more hostility, which makes it more likely for him to get shot.’”

The following day, 12 September 2007, the Wall Street Journal reported in another article about another situation of shooting the messenger, as follows: “American Airlines told the Transportation Security Administration in July, that a passenger on a flight to New York had slapped a flight attendant across the face when the plane was ordered emptied in Miami after bad weather kept the flight from leaving. Police were called.”

“Those middlemen aren’t responsible for disruptive decisions or business failures. But they’re the poor souls held accountable.” (WSJ, 11 September 2007)

As EA practitioners, we are often the messengers of corporate news; we analyze problems areas and uncover gaps, redundancies, inefficiencies, and opportunities. Often, others in the organization do not want to hear about these problems and do not want EA to be providing the solutions. Instead, they look to shoot the EA messenger. Rather than pointing fingers and letting off steam at the EA folks doing their jobs, how about teaming up, collaborating, and working to improve the organization and make things better for everyone!

Shooting the Messenger and Enterprise Architecture