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Managing Projects - Coggle Diagram
Managing Projects
IT projects failure:
- Botched execution(flunks cost, schedule, or quality targets)
- Cannot deliver promised business benefits
Triple constraint is cheap, fast and good (choose any two)80/20 rule: 80% business needs are met by 20% of projects featuresLean principles: Business involvement, rapid iteration, and less codeRollout strategy: How a completed project is rolled out to users; abruptly replace, run in parallel , or chunk rollout
Causes of failure:
- imprecise business intent
- Unnecessary complexity
- Lack of explicit tradeoffs
Antidotes to failure:
- Discovering latent business needs
- Curbing scopes
- Explicit accountability for business benefits
A Dismal Track Record
- Two of three IT projects fail
- Half never deliver intended businesses
- Larger projects are 5-10 times worse
- Afflicts small and large firms, non-profits, and governments worldwide
- Problems that derail IT projects are often predictable and preventable
Consequences Worsening 1) Business penalties worsening because:
- Larger projects, touch more parts of firms and baked into more products and services
2) Most rigorous testing leaves half the bugs undetected:
- Malfunctioning products, stalled operations, failed firms, even deaths
3) How IT is developed failing to keep pace with its growing complexity:
- Handcrafted, painstakingly, error prone, 100-150 mistakes in every thousand lines of code
Deja vu, Again
- Timeless lessons from projects with:
1) Massive scale
2) Uncertainty
3) Bickering stakeholders
4) Railroads, the electric grid, highways, moon landings, and Hoover
- Making new mistakes is not same as repeating old mistakes
- Massive infrastructure project that promised to
1) Speed the global flow of goods
2) Mark the death of distance in global commerce
3) Wipe out inefficiencies
4) Make a fortune for all investors and stakeholders
- But....
1) Completed six years behind schedule
2) Cost twice as much
3) Promised payoff a hundred years behind schedule
Today....
- 17000 ships with 1000 million tons of cargo each year and Egypt's share: $6 billion of year
Lesson for IT projects:
- "Obvious" technical merits on paper don't get a project used which is Suez: Pirate-free, shorter, cheaper trip
- Expect no payoff until it's used
Lesson for IT projects from the London Electrobus II:
1) Simultaneously counting on too many unproven technologies risky
2) Clever technology does not guarantee success
3) Doomed without complements (then and now, charging stations)
Lesson for IT projects from Hoover Dam (1930s):
1) Micromanage what but not how
Why Non-IT Managers Matters:
- Good IT projects management increasingly indistinguishable from good business management
- Invariably has an IT element:
1) Any strategic move
2) Business model tweak
3) Process improvement
- IT projects managers skilled at managing technical risks
- Only non-IT managers can prevent their business failure
1) Under delivering intended business benefits
2) IT project managers ill-equipped to tackle this
- Non-IT managers' contributions -the right system faster and cheaper
Business failure from 3x preventable mistakes:
1) Ambiguity of purpose -wrong system
2) Unnecessary complexity
3) Non-IT managers silent on the triple constraint
1: Ambiguity of purpose
- Poor biz-IT communication= the wrong system
- Business benefits-not technical features-define value
- Latent needs for example: The RAID story where need that's present but not yet visible
- IT cannot build what you don't ask for
1) leads to feature-bloated, kitchen-sink over-engineering
2) antidote comes solely from non-IT managers
- The cardinal sin is non-IT managers not articulating a business goal
- Unnecessary complexity
- Cause: Ballooning scope (which is one system tries to do too much)
- As a projects get larger...
1) Defects rise in proportion
2) Integration problems compound
3) Becomes incomprehensible to any one person
- Not explicitly choosing tradeoffs
- A failure to make one tradeoff between fast, cheap, or good
- Non-IT managers must pick one to give up
1) Driven by a project's business objectives
2) If time and money are scarce , curb scope
2 Risks beyond Non-IT Managers Control: 1) Use of immature technology in a project
- uncertainty which is not equal to ambiguity
- PM only tackles ambiguity but uncertainty requires real options thinking
2) Underestimation of time and money
- Initial estimates define project success, yet often underestimated
- Common because...
1) Smaller commitments more likely to be approved
2) Estimation is more an art than science
Antidotes to Business Failure of IT Projects:
1) Discover a project's true business purpose
2) Curbing scope creep
3) Accountability without micromanagement
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Antidote 2: Curb Scope
- Threat: Attempting too much, with too little or too fast
- Tame scope using 80/20
- Which 20%?
- MoSCoW rule applied to requirements by non-IT managers:
Must-have
Should-have
Could-have, but not critical
Wont-have this time, but maybe later
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