Managing Projects
Risks beyond Non-IT managers control:
⭐ Use of immature technology in a project
⭐Underestimation of time and money
Why Non-IT Managers Matter
A Dismal Track Record
• Two of three IT projects fail
• Half never deliver intended business benefits
• Larger projects are 5-10 times worse
• Afflicts small and large firms, non-profits, and governments worldwide
• Problems are often predictable and preventable
Examples of repeated mistakes:
– Massive scale
– Uncertainty
– Bickering stakeholders
– Railroads, the electric grid, highways, moon landings, and Hoover
✅ Consequences Worsening:
– Larger projects
– Touch more parts of firms
– Baked into more products and services
✅ Most rigorous testing leaves half the bugs undetected
– Malfunctioning products, stalled operations, failed firms, even deaths
✅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
Can prevent the business failure:
-Under-delivering intended business benefits
-IT projects managers ill-equipped to tackle
Contributions: the right system (faster & cheaper)
Business Failure:
-Ambiguity of purpose (wrong system)
-Unnecessary complexity
-Non-IT managers silent on the triple constraint
Ambiguity of purpose
Not explicitly choosing tradeoffs
-A failure to make one tradeoff (fast, cheap, good)
-Trying to achieve all three always results in none
-Must pick one to give up
-Poor IT communications will create wrong system
-Latent needs (need that's present but not yet
visible)
The cardinal sin is non-IT managers not articulating
a business goal
Unnecessary complexity
-Cause: Ballooning scope
-As project gets larger: defects rise in proportion
-integration problems compound
-becomes incomprehensible to any person
Previous Project
Jargon Decoder
London Electrobus (1907)
-Battery operated
-300% over budget
-30/50 never completed
-Flunked cost, quality and schedule
Lessons:
-Simultaneously counting on too many unproven
technologies'
Clever technology does not guarantee success
-Doomed without complements
Hoover Dam (1930)
-Completed two years early and under budget
-Managers created master plan but gave engineers
discretion over their work
Lesson: -Micromanage what but not how
Causes of failure:
-Imprecise business intent
-Unnecessary complexity
-Lack of explicit tradeoffs
-IT project failure (Botched execution)
-Triple constraint (Cheap, fast and good)
-80/20 rule (80% Business meet, 20% project)
-Lean principles (Business involvement)
-Rollout strategy (How a completed project is rolled
out to users)
Antidotes to failure:
-Discovering latent business needs
Curbing scope
-Explicit accountability for business benefits
1) Discovering latent business needs
2) Curb scope
3) Accountability without micromanagement
Foundational principles:
-Active business participation
-Short iterations
Less code
MoSCoW rules:
-Must-have
-Should-have -Could-have
-Wont-have
4 elements:
-Intended impact (Operational, strategic, financial)
-Promise (Better/faster/cheaper)
-Change metric (Dollars/percentage/time)
-Time to impact after completion (Years/months)