Why Do Companies’ IT Projects Fail So Often?
Remember that IT project that your company launched and turned out to be a bust? The answer, of course, is yes: There are likely few organizations that haven’t been touched by some IT project mishap, or worse, disaster. How can that be? Why, despite decades of implementing IT systems, are organizations still struggling with their tech projects? My colleague, R.M. Bastien, and I have studied hundreds of such projects, and found that the root causes of failing or underachieving tech investments were rarely where executives would ever have thought to look.
The problem: They were focusing on symptoms, not the true causes. What are those true causes? Here are four we’ve identified—and what organizations can do about them. No.
1: The illusion of control Central to a number of these hidden causes is an investment process that begins with someone—usually a manager or budget holder—needing some technology to either solve a problem or take advantage of an opportunity. The IT department will then build or acquire the tech solution, since all requests concerned with technology flow through this single department. The consequence is that on one side is the “customer" (the business unit) and on the other, the “supplier" (the IT department).
The customer wants to be certain it is getting what it paid for, so it will demand some oversight of project progress and visibility of any risks. They may establish a committee for this purpose and determine appropriate reporting metrics—typically time and cost. Unfortunately, all of this merely gives them the illusion of being in control.
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