Or, how to avoid being a statistic….
I read a recent Harvard Business Review “The Daily Stat,” that noted that a study by McKinsey & Company that was reported on in the September 2011 issues of Harvard Business Review noted that 15% of IT change projects are huge money sinks with cost overruns averaging 200% and schedule overruns of almost 70%.
The Daily Stat notes that in order to avoid such risks, smart companies are breaking big projects down into smaller initiatives to better manage them along with making contingency plans to deal with unavoidable risks.
This reminded me of a recent conversation with a friend who works at a large pharmaceutical company. He was recently telling me that for the 3rd time (yes…you read that correctly…the 3rd time), his company was working on developing and launching a new Learning Management System (LMS) for the company and was having great difficulty in doing so. The project had already failed twice and certainly did not have much support this time around. Part of his issue, he knew, was that the leadership team wanted full functionality immediately.
My friend was having difficulty with convincing the senior leadership in the organization that this project had to be done differently this time around if it was going to be successful. I contacted him as soon as I read this Daily Stat as I knew it would help him to get his message across!
Here is his plan to move forward with the LMS project at his company:
Present to the leadership team his idea to break the LMS project into smaller chunks: enable one or two components of functionality first, and then, over a year and a half time period, enable additional functionality. Once approval is gained, he will take these steps:
- Work with the various business units to determine needs and priority around the LMS to develop a schedule for roll out of various functionality to meet needs
- Share this information with the leadership team to get approval to move forward
- Develop an overall program plan for each component (or mini project) of the main LMS project
- Ensure that each mini project (a particular functionality of the LMS) had the following:
- Project plan including:
- Stakeholders identified who need to be involved
- Recommended team members
- A requirements gathering process
- A schedule for development, testing and roll out
- Communication plans
- Training plans for those using the LMS
- A plan to measure the success of the launch of the functionality
- Lessons learned captured and applied in future LMS mini projects
He presented this plan to his executives just last week – their response – “Excellent! Please move ahead.”
Lesson learned: Although he knew that he was biting off more than he could chew, he has done every major IT project in this way – as one complex project rather than trying to break them down into mini projects. The moment he read the information and recommendations on Harvard Business Review’s The Daily Stat – he knew what he had to do! It was a matter of educating the senior leadership team on the best approach to take to the initiative. Certainly explaining to them that it would save money in the long run and avoid another failure was essential to getting approval to move forward.
How about you? What will you do on your next complex IT or application development project to ensure it is a success?
