IT projects without a goal

I see a lot of IT projects that are undertaken without a clear goal and this gets reflected in the failures. A good example is the recent cancellation of an SAP implementation by Select Comfort hotels.

During periods of slow sales or recession, a company should be focused on improving productivity or reducing costs. Implementation of new software should be based on increased sales, improved productivity or reduced costs. In this case, Select Comfort is cancelling an SAP implementation to save money. This is contrary to what they should be doing, if the original purpose was valid.

As described in the referenced BLOG entry and original announcement, the SAP implementation didn't seem to have a business goal. There were no identified problems with the original ORACLE system and no defined need for the conversion.

If Select Comfort had a measurable goal, they wouldn't have cancelled it during a slow period. They would have intensified their efforts.

Computer systems reliability and business impact.

An article on computer systems reliability from ZDNET Asia quotes statistics from Freeform Dynamics that shows the impact on business from what they call software resiliency. This means the system's ability to recover from software failures.

Some of the statistics include:

• 24% of organizations suffer from a software failure once per week.
• In addition, 34% suffer from a software failure once per month.
• Even worse, 20% of organizations suffer from financial or legal issues once per quarter.

These problems cause major business impact. In most cases, these problems can be prevented by planning for systems to be resilient. Yet organizations focus on new business functions, creating more dependence on these systems, and seldom plan for resilient systems. They assume that systems will work and react to failures.

Despite significant improvements in computer systems over the years, systems continue to fail. These failures can be prevented by proper planning, or at least the impact of these failures minimized.

Many technical support staff enjoy diagnosing problems and become very good at it. However, the business suffers while they react. Until business owners and managers insist on software reliability and understand the impact to their business, things will not improve.

The original article can be found here.

Security: another of the list of items of concern to business owners

Technology is a wonderful thing. It creates new opportunities to build a global business from your home. All businesses need computers today, most jobs require computers to get things done, and yet many people pass the job of managing computers to junior staff.

It's understandable that business owners don't want to do the drudge work. Unless you get excited by doing a lot of routine activities, managing computers is not exciting work. It also gets in the way of managing your business. You want to get customers, make sales, bring in revenue. Sometimes, it's hard to relate computer activities to managing your business. The most important ones are the routine ones, the ones that we forget, or don't understand the implications.

This list of security related issues affect most small businesses. They affect large ones too, but large businesses have people who focus on this. In a small business, the buck stops at the business owner. It doesn't mean that the business owner has to be involved every day, but has to make decisions on these issues and ensure that somebody is covering it (either staff or a supplier). If not, the risk is loss of data, loss of productivity and in many cases, loss of a business.

IT Project failure

Over the years, many studies have been done, looking at the success rates for IT projects. All of the traditional issues are always raised, and they often are categorized as some of the following, as it was on this Blog "12 early warning signs of IT failure". The list includes:

1. Lack of top management support
2. Weak project manager
3. No stakeholder involvement and/or participation
4. Weak commitment of project team
5. Team members lack requisite knowledge and/or skills
6. Subject matter experts are over-scheduled
7. Lack of documented requirements and/or success criteria
8. No change control process (change management)
9. Ineffective schedule planning and/or management
10. Communication breakdown among stakeholders
11. Resources assigned to a higher priority project
12. No business case for the project

While these may all be valid, there is one underlying issue that is not mentioned. One of the first things that I was taught in problem solving ( a basic introduction to any computer course is "root cause analysis"). Root cause analysis says that you shouldn't look at the first level of causes to understand why something is happenning, but look a few levels down to the underlying causes of these causes. This is also a standard quality management practice.

When we look at some of the above-mentioned causes, we find:

• Lack of top management support
• No stakeholder involvement and/or participation
• Weak commitment of project team
• Subject matter experts are over-scheduled
• Lack of documented requirements and/or success criteria
• Communication breakdown among stakeholders
• Resources assigned to a higher priority project
• No business case for the project

All of these related to the fact that this was not something of value to the business. If top management and the business units don't want it, these things will happen. So why do projects get started, and why is time and money spent on them?

Projects get started for good business reasons, but quickly get into "project mode". They cease being a business need and become an IT project. The project team starts talking about implementing software instead of upgrading business performance. Time stretches out as we build a sophisticated system to provide all options that might be requested at some time in the future (it never comes). Let's get back to basics and focus on the business outcomes that the business needs. By focusing on those business outcomes, that should deliver benefits to the business, we will not only have more successful projects, they will deliver the value and keep the interest of top management and the stakeholders.