IT Projects Flop

Bokeh

Interesting article on Fox News about getting personnel to embrace new technology. This paragraph sums it up pretty good:

Up to 70 percent of IT projects wind up as flops, according to Forrester Research (NASDAQ:FORR). In many cases, the new systems -- whether hardware, software, or Web-based applications -- sit idle because employees either find them too difficult to use or simply refuse to try. "IT projects fail not because of the technology but because human beings resist change and uncertainty," says Moez Limayem, who chairs the information systems department at the Sam M. Walton College of Business at the University of Arkansas.

The whole article is at http://www.foxbusiness.com/story/small-business/getting-employees-embrace-new-technology/ if anyone is interested in reading.

We are working towards a paperless office, and are fighting some of the battles mentioned in the article as well.

darkerosxx

Yeah, that's always a hard fight, depending on the environment. Lots of project management philosophy works on making sure the right people approve of projects and support them. When the right people support them and you can get a project "champion" to push through obstacles, usually you have a better chance of success.

You may be interested in looking at A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge.

RussS

I agree that end users can be a bit of a problem, but my pet peeve is IT or software companies recommending software solutions based on what they use to test.

Kind of OT - but in the same vein.

An example is a Real Estate company client of mine that was having issues with their new rental software. They had been on an earlier version from this company and got updated to the latest version - which then ran like a pig. Nothing could be done to make it run smoothly and even though this company was in a Terminal Server environment the software company then claimed that it didn't support TS. Every time they made a change things got decidedly twitchy and there was a whloe lot of end user dissatisfaction.
Finally they got one of th their SQL guys to check things out and told us that it was because the server was badly configured (note - any SQL configuration changes had been recommended by them). Sent me a screen shot and the issue was blindingly obvious ...
My client was running their software on a SBS server with about 3.5GB RAM - the software developers were using a dedicated SQL server running Enterprise with 8GB RAM and had it configured to use most of the 8GB for SQL. We told them to go away and test their software on something like their clients would be using (all of my clients running this software are on SBS with similar specs) so they went away and tested. The end of month operation that was taking my client 5+ hrs took 7+ hours on their new test system. Guess what? ...... they finally admitted that they might have a problem

Sometimes it is not the end users preception .... yes the new solution can be a lemon

tdempsey

My last employer rolled out sharepoint and told everybody to start using it.

That was the extent of the training right there.

Guess what? Nobody used it and there it sits to this day and they are paying for it, year after year. A little training would have gone a long way for something like this.

Same employer purchased licensing for IDM ( identity management) for Novell but decided that we could accomplish the configuation and development for it inhouse to save us something like 200K in consultancy/development fees. It's an incredibly complicated thing to setup and nobody has the bandwidth for it. So they hired a dedicated DBA type guy to start working on it and act as an application administrator. Within 3 months, they pulled him off to work on something else. So again, going on year two and nothing has come out of that project yet and they paid 80k last year for licensing alone.

Has anybody seen this kind of thing or was this situation unique?

coffeeking

tdempsey wrote:

My last employer rolled out sharepoint and told everybody to start using it.

That was the extent of the training right there.

Guess what? Nobody used it and there it sits to this day and they are paying for it, year after year. A little training would have gone a long way for something like this.

Same employer purchased licensing for IDM ( identity management) for Novell but decided that we could accomplish the configuation and development for it inhouse to save us something like 200K in consultancy/development fees. It's an incredibly complicated thing to setup and nobody has the bandwidth for it. So they hired a dedicated DBA type guy to start working on it and act as an application administrator. Within 3 months, they pulled him off to work on something else. So again, going on year two and nothing has come out of that project yet and they paid 80k last year for licensing alone.

Has anybody seen this kind of thing or was this situation unique?

Nope, not unique at all, been there done that. We have a software that can be used to keep track of assets and perform risk assessments, but because of the not-very-user-friendliness factor of the application, neither one of us wants to use it, even though we are constantly forced to do so, mainly to show that we are using it and its not in waste. Excel sheets work way better and lot easier to work with.

Back in college I took a project management class taught by a PMP instructor, who told us that about 80% of IT projects never meet their deadlines and a lot of them just fail. The biggest factor in this; and I have seen it happen, the human factor. It is hard to manage humans than anything else, technology won't solve anything unless you tell it do something. I include myself in that human factor, I don't do everything the way I am told to do, I guess its just the human nature.

KGhaleon

I remember hearing about this back in 2004, I don't think it's new. I think it's been like that for a while.

JDMurray

I'm always amazed at how many internal IT projects are developed and implemented, but there is very little or no training in its use. Software for bug reporting, document tracking, change control management, project management, and even Outlook systems are installed on an intranet and people are just expected to figure out how to use it. It's no wonder such resources fall into disuse. No internal IT project budget should be approved if it does not contain the cost of training for the users.