MANAGEMENT ROLE IN MAJOR IT INITIATIVES
The failure rate of IT initiatives is surprisingly high. Project failure occurs when a project is significantly over budget, takes much longer than the estimated timeline, or has to be terminated because so many problems have occurred that proceeding is no longer judged to be viable. Cook finds that 35 percent of IT projects were successful, whereas 19 percent failed. The remaining 46 percent delivered a useful product but suffered from budget overruns, prolonged timetables, and application feature shortfalls.
Cash, McFarlan, and McKenney note that two major categories of risk confront significant IT investments: strategy failures and implementation failures. The project failure rates suggest that management should be more worried about IT implementation than IT strategy. IT strategy is sexier and more visionary than implementation. However, a very large number of strategies and visions go nowhere or are diminished because the organization is unable to implement them.
It is rare that leaders plan to fail. And yet they often do things or don’t do things that increase the likelihood that a major initiative will fail. At times they don’t appreciate the myriad ways that projects can go south and hence they fail to take steps to mitigate those risk factors. In the sections that follow we discuss factors that imperil implementations, factors that can be managed.
