Software is a critical component of any business today, yet the success rate is very poor. Numerous studies have been done over the last 25 years showing the following breakdown:
- 25% are deemed by business people to have been successful.
- 50% are deemed to have been somewhat successful.
- 25% are deemed to have been failures or not implemented.
The IT industry has focused on improving project management to improve the success rate, yet it hasn’t changed much over the past 25 years. Percentages vary by a few points, but remain relatively flat.
Why is that?
The reason is simple. These projects are seen as IT projects and IT is trying to solve it with improved project management. It is not a project management issue! While the reason may be simple, the solution seems to be a challenge.
Software change projects are business change projects, but are managed as IT projects driven by IT. While IT has a major role to play, they will only own the technology results when they are finished. They will not be responsible for the business results, nor even see them or measure them.
Since most of these projects have a lot of technical components, the focus ends up being on these technical components and the complexities of installing the technical components. So most business managers ignore the issues and focus on what’s important …. Their business.
They wait for business results to be delivered at the end of the project, and go back to managing their business.
The problem is that no matter how good the software is, it will not produce business results. The business will, if it is getting better, faster, so that better decisions can be made.
The steps to successful business (software) change projects are:
- Define your business outcomes.
- Analyze the current state of your business operations (processes).
- Define how you need operations to change to achieve your goals.
- Develop your business case based on the business value obtained from improved business outcomes.
- Protect business value throughout the project.
- Deliver business value early.
The following link tells a story of two projects.
