Project Failure

- Will Wieder, CIO of Ministry Health Care

Will Weider is CIO of Ministry Health Care and Affinity Health System. He loves to share what he learned through his mistakes and other crazy things in the life of a healthcare CIO. Visit him at http://candidcio.com/ Read original article at http://candidcio.com/2008/04/09/failure/

My personal approach to IT management centers around success. Most IT projects fail. Some quite spectacularly, but most in a quieter way. I believe these are the three leading contributors to failure:

Poor Project Plans and Resource Allocation

My personal experience is that most IT departments do not have a good sense for the amount of time they have to spend on IT projects. All of the data I have collected since I have been studying this suggests that only 15% to 25% of total staff time is available to work on new projects. If organizations take on more work than they can complete, everything proceeds at a snail’s pace and nothing ever truly gets done.

The only way to manage resources in a large organization is to have detailed plans for every project and to look at the resource requirements across all of your plans.

Vendor Performance

Just as IT departments over-allocate their resources, so do vendors. Vendor performance issues are usually more related to them not providing services in the time expected (or not having a common expectation with the vendor) than bad software. However, sucky software is still an issue.

Lack of Clear Expectations

If someone’s goal is just to implement some software than, in my opinion, they have failed by default. Each IT implementation should have clear business benefits and those benefits need to remain insight throught the effort.

Am I missing other common contributors to failure?

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Delphi Technique

One of the Risk Identification technique, used to gather information.

In Delphi Techique, the participants dont usually know each other, nor they have to be present at the same location.

A Moderator or project Manager will usually communicate with the participants to identify the Risk and consolidate all the risks identified by them.

This is one of the best technique of Risk identification, as the participants (not necessarily be only from project team) would not be influenced by other participants, as they usually do not know each other.

-Posted by Sundar