How to execute IT projects successfully

 According to a 2008 Gartner report, 15% of all information technology (IT) projects failed that year due to high cost variance, while 18% were unsuccessful because they were substantially late. This means that in 2008, one in three technology projects failed. Why such a dismal success rate?

 Such projects primarily involve the management of human resources in order to accomplish the target schedule, cost and quality, so it is safe to assume that poor resource management played a large role. Unfortunately, without effective resource management processes, such organisations are left asking questions such as:

“Who is working on what?”
“How do I get this project back on schedule?”
“How much more work will it take to finish?”

 Resource management

 IT project teams are made up of knowledge workers who are categorised by skill types or job functions. For example, a project team may require business analysts, developers, team leaders, project managers, architects or database analysts.

 Finding the right person to assign to a project or task can be the most challenging problem confronting the organisation. Typically, quality staff is scarce and therefore heavily sought by competing projects. Without resource management processes, the organisation struggles with allocation of its staff across projects.

 Project management

 In addition, project managers are responsible for keeping on track the scope, budget and schedules. How can project managers achieve this when they do not know how many hours it takes to accomplish a task, or how many hours remain in the project? Without an effective system in place, project managers must constantly intrude on team members to get estimates.

 Likewise, the management team is always asking for status reports and accurate information on projects so that they can make critical decisions. Of course, the project manager is always the last to know when one of his/her critical resources has been magically ‘reassigned’ to another high-profile project! In the words of a well-known song by John Mayer, many project managers are “stitched up out of [their] mind, feeling strung out, laggin’ behind, all trapped in, can’t do a thing because [they are] locked down…”

 Executive decision-making

 From an executive perspective, it is impossible to make effective decisions when one does not know what people are working on or how the projects are doing. Additionally, if strategic projects do not have priority for critical, scarce resources, it will cause stress for the organisation as a whole.

 Many organisations feel that it is enough to track project progress on a percentage complete basis. Unfortunately, this is not consistent with established methodologies, which nearly always suggest that the only accurate measure of progress is tracking work effort (i.e. time).

 The answer

 Integrating plans with actuals

 Projects are executed in order to bring in a positive return on investment (ROI). The ROI may be lowering risk, enhancing the organisation’s strategy, streamlining processes, complying with regulations, or otherwise improving the state of the organisation in some way. This potential return must be quantified in financial terms, even if it is only a very rough estimate of the benefit provided. It motivates people to understand why they are working so hard, and a big number is a good motivation.

 The other half of ROI is the investment or cost. Project managers and executives cannot know if a project was successful or not unless they understand its cost. In today’s globalised knowledge worker world, project costs are mainly derived from the cost of labour. Consequently, tracking time to projects and tasks is an inescapable requirement for measuring project ROI.

 If 10% of a project’s allocated budget has been spent and only 5% of the work has been completed, there is a problem. Project managers who track employee actuals and find this out early in the project have a fighting chance of recovery. Those who do not, will find out much later that their projects are drastically over budget. This is merely one example of how real-time data enables project managers to fix problems before they start.

 Insight into resource availability

 In a 100-person organisation, there are always five or 10 people who are overbooked. Everyone wants these people to work on their project. Every time one of them takes a vacation or becomes ill, the organisation groans. Conversely, there are other people who are under-utilised. Even when project managers understand resource availability, it changes. They may run around and get all the vacation schedules recorded in a big spreadsheet, only to find that a week later it has all been moved.

 What project managers require is real-time access to team member schedules, tasks and available time. This makes assigning people to tasks much easier. Such a system must also be Web-based, since the team is probably not all in one work space for 24 hours a day. This is why spreadsheets do not work very well. Not only are they unable to be audited, but they do not allow for global access from various participants.

 Real data for the CXO

 It is extremely important to present project data to management in an easily consumable way. Executives simply want to know, at a glance, what is broken or about to be broken. They are problem solvers, and they can only succeed if they have up-to-date, accurate information. Such data will further allow executives to prioritise projects based on their value to the organisation at large.

 The bottom line

 When IT workers track their time by task and project, project managers can address problems as soon as they surface; and executives can understand cost expenditure. This will put an end to project failure, as well as eliminate the waste of resources on projects that are not profitable to
the organisation. No IT organisation can afford to have one out of three of its projects fail, but with the right procedures in place, it will not have to. 

 Curt Finch and Bruce McGraw

 Finch is the chief executive officer of Journyx, which offers customers two solutions to reach the highest levels of profitability: Journyx Timesheet – a timesheet and expense management solution for the entire enterprise; and Journyx ProjectXecute – a solution that unites project and process planning with resource management. Journyx has thousands of customers worldwide and is the first and only company to establish per person/per project profitability – a proprietary process that enables customers to gather and analyse information to discover profit opportunities.

 Finch is an avid speaker and author, and recently published All Your Money Won’t Another Minute Buy: Valuing Time as a Business Resource. He authors a project management blog, and you can follow him on Twitter. McGraw is the CEO of Cognitive Technologies (www.cogtechinc.com), a professional services firm delivering project and programme management services, products, and project management office tool implementation to commercial and government clients.

 He holds an MS in Technology Management from the University of Maryland’s University College and a BS in Business Administration from the University of South Carolina. McGraw is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and is an active member of the Project Management Institute. He has trained in four project management methodologies, has authored numerous articles, and presented workshops in a variety of topics, including managing virtual project teams.