Programme Management — The Avatar Decade?
The latest Standish Report didn’t surprise me. Known as their “CHAOS Summary,” it showed a “marked decrease in project success rate” over the past several years. Indeed, the esteemed Standish Group reported that the year’s results represent “the highest failure rate in over a decade”.
And where individual projects fail, then entire Programmes of Change will fail.
Highest failure rate in OVER A DECADE? Are we going BACKWARDS in our ability to implement IT-enabled change or even to run any kind of project successfully?
The short answer is Yes. And several reasons come to mind.
First, we are off-shoring a great deal of our project work — to usually fairly competent developers. Dis-locate the developers and those who need the new IT system (the users) and — bingo — the failure rate increases.
Note that this is attributable most likely to poor communication and less-than-spiffy management of the quality of intermediate outputs rather than a failure of distant programmers or of local users per se.
Second, who’s in charge? Have we forgotten the lessons laid down so carefully by the Generation X’ers and aging Baby Boomers who figured this out in the Dark Ages of IT? Possibly so!
There was a time (back in the 90′s) when users could actually make sense of IT. CIO’s and developers alike bothered to make it make even better sense to users at all levels. Decisions back then were informed decisions and communication was rampant. Users were made to feel that They Were In Charge. They were. And rightly so.
Not today. Users are all too frequently dazzled by new technology and completely unprepared to engage in designing it. Call it The Avatar Decade. Users fail to see the connection between their needs and what lands on their desks 12 months later. And CIO’s are failing to make that connection clear.
Proper Programme Management isn’t magic. We can’t send our own personal John Camerons off to fiddle with technology in secret for years upon years to come back with a 3D miracle. We have to ensure users are both involved and in control, all the way, through thick and thin.
Only then will the successful programme miracle occur.
