Jim Stewart talks about a case study concerning a project that he had been assigned, along with several others, on a stalled, botched, major IT initiative.
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I like one of the solutions by the management to hire a deployment team whose responsibility it was to obliterate whatever obstacles stood in the way of a successful rollout of the project. It began a series of successes that eventually led to a step in the right direction.
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What a great concept though: a team to eliminate all the obstacles in the way of people getting their jobs done. Their ultimate job was to be a bridge between all of the various teams involved with the project and to help things to work smoothly between them.
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After going through a lot of anguish and pressure, finally the management got on board and began to listen to others in reference to what would make the project work.
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Here a couple of the other steps taken to turn things around:
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Assess the situation. Instead of continuing down the same failed path, sit down and evaluate where you are versus where you expected to be. Ideally, you have controls in place from the beginning of the project. But if not, it’s never too late to make an assessment.
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Decide to end the project or continue. Too many projects continue regardless of whether they benefit the organization. You should always be considering whether a project is valuable, i.e., is it aligned with strategic objectives or has outlived its usefulness? If the latter, cut your losses and move on. These projects will drag you down.
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Be prepared to make tough decisions. In this instance, one of the senior managers — outside the project team — was making promises on which he couldn't deliver. He was ultimately demoted. Additionally, the project office was bypassed for the duration of the project. While it may seem counterintuitive to do that, in this instance that organization had become much more of a political legacy than a truly productive group.
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Read the article for the rest of the lessons learned that turned things around; it’s very good!
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Needles to say this can't work with every project. Imagine a loose nut on the end of a lasser cannon blowing out obstacles. A seek and destroy mentality and in many ways this is what was done. It works great from an IT mentality, but it sucks in the business operations reality zone.
Rather than backtrack and develop the project the right way they elected to save face and money and blast it through. Not real management intellegence or skill here.
If they had been involved from the begining such tactics may have been avoided. Imagine management driving the design and development instead of an IT team that had no clue about what business was or how it functioned. There would 40% failures and some hugely successful projects. And no blood spilt, well maybe a little.
Posted by: Tim Whelan | March 6, 2006 9:43 AM | Permalink to Comment