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September 17, 2004
Ron Gandiza
A
common question asked at IT Pro User Group
meetings and on career message boards is how IT
Professionals can differentiate themselves in a
marketplace that is full of experienced and
certified IT Professionals.
One key
differentiator – project management.
The
economic downturn over the past few years forced
many companies to downsize the number of IT
Professionals on staff, but they did not reduce
the number of projects. Instead, the remaining
staff wore “multiple hats” in an effort to
finish the projects on-time and within budget.
The “hats” often included systems analyst,
business analyst, project manager, and technical
lead. What was the result?
-
An estimated 90
percent of large scale IT projects ($6M
budget or more) failed. Failure was defined
as the inability to deliver 90 percent of
the promised functionality on time and on
budget.
-
Roughly 40 percent of
all IT projects undertaken either failed or
were abandoned.
-
Approximately 51
percent of large scale IT projects exceeded
budget by an average of 189 percent.
There are a number of reasons cited for the dim
statistics, but the following summarize both the
problems as well as the solutions:
-
Project management is
about managing change
-
If you can’t measure
it, you can’t manage it
-
If you fail to plan,
you plan to fail
According to the
Project Management Institute (PMI), project
management is “the application of best
practices, knowledge and tools to a project in
order to meet project goals and the expectations
of your customers.” A simpler definition is
that project management is about managing
change, which points out a major problem – IT is
always changing (approximately every 18 months
according to some industry stats). What does
this mean to an IT Professional? It means that
you have to constantly monitor the status of
your projects and adjust, as needed, to make
sure you stay on course.
The question
isn’t whether or not something will change in
your project (i.e. a customer expectation
or technology direction),
the question is
how quickly will your team/company adjust to the
change when it happens.
How do you know when something has changed in
your project and what the impact is? Simple –
you measure it. This requires some work
upfront, because you have to identify the key
metrics you need to measure (based on the needs
of your customers/stakeholders), the fundamental
goals you are trying to reach (also known as a
baseline), and how you are going to measure the
change. Some project managers use a project
management tool, such as Microsoft Project,
while others simply use Microsoft Excel and/or
Outlook. IT Professionals hate this part
because we feel we have no time to update
documents and/or create status reports. While
this may or may not be true, at a minimum,
you need to
collect three vital stats periodically from your
team to help measure the progress of each task
during a project:
-
What are the
goals/key metrics (i.e. new inventory
application that provides daily status of
all inventory)
-
How much work has
been completed to date (i.e. 0-100%)
-
How much was actually
spent ($$)
These three stats can be easily entered in a
tool, such as Microsoft Project or Excel, to
provide some useful projections and allow
management to make informed decisions.
IT
Professionals are notorious for moving forward
quickly without spending enough time on
planning. In fact, “plan” is often considered a
four-letter word for IT Professionals that would
rather solve problems and ask questions later.
However, the cost of failure has already proven
enormous for IT projects. What is part of the
planning process? For IT projects, it’s
extremely important to understand all customer
requirements, determine communication
needs/channels, identify risks, and plan for any
changes that might occur. These tasks all
require resources, yet the costs associated with
the planning phase (i.e. research time and
equipment) are frequently not even budgeted as
part of the total project, which can range from
20-30% of a projects estimated execution phase.
If the word
“plan” is a four-letter word in your
organization, then change it to “think” – a nice
five-letter word that breeds “careful
consideration” as opposed to “paralysis
analysis.” For instance, you can say
“let’s think this project through a bit more.”
There are many IT Professionals that believe
project management is simply common sense, but
based on the current failure rate of IT
projects, that would imply that a huge
population of IT Professionals has no common
sense at all. Project management is certainly
common sense but is not just about common
sense. It is a discipline that the IT industry
is starting to recognize as a critical skill set
needed by every IT Professional – the ability to
deliver on projects on-time and within budget.
IT Professionals
that differentiate themselves in the marketplace
with their project management experience and
training will find opportunity knocking a lot
more often. |