True teamwork helps avoid IT project failure

Julian Dobbins says better collaboration is needed on software projects

Julian Dobbins: IT project failures can be reduced with improved collaboration

We hear that IT projects are failing in large numbers. If this is the case, many may struggle to meet the needs of their customers over the next 12 months.

To make matters worse, recovery is expected to happen alongside zero growth in IT budgets or employee numbers, putting greater pressure on IT to deliver what the business needs. If 2009 was about cutting costs and non-essential projects, 2010 is about the ‘more’ part of ‘doing more with less’.

Often users are simply never consulted on what they want their new system to achieve or on project challenges. This is both unacceptable and inexplicable, especially when many production defects are considered to have been created in a project’s early stages.

Costs associated with fixing such problems rise the longer they remain undiscovered. So the connections established last year between IT spending and business performance metrics are probably here to stay.

However, necessity has shown itself to be the mother – if not of invention – of adoption. Organisations of all sizes want to break through yet another glass ceiling of productivity and cost-efficiency.

Perhaps they need to start thinking like the underfunded start-up that is always in the throes of a one-company recession. It is not about working harder, but smarter and more efficiently on the projects that matter and drive revenue and growth. It is also essential to stay close enough to the business along the way to know when priorities change and new goals arise.

It is also about knowing when enough is enough, so that software no longer arrives bloated with redundant features that seemed like a good idea on the drawing board. If requirements are delivered incrementally and in line with business priority, projects not only complete sooner.

Members of the software delivery team should work together rather than against each other. Companies must look to drive quality throughout the development lifecycle and make use of facilities and processes that support this.

Agile development methods drive (if not demand) greater levels of collaboration, and these methods are taking root in mainstream development shops.

Vendors should provide the tools and the process support to help companies succeed with their projects. Drive quality from the start of the process – for example, testing against user stories rather than function points.

Only then will the growth that everyone is predicting, the growth that everyone needs, come to the industry on the back of fundamental, grass roots improvement, rather than through increasing the stress levels of an already stretched group of people.

Julian Dobbins is head of analyst relations at Micro Focus