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)