Information Technology Projects and Change

Submitted by sbuttgereit on Thu, 03/26/2009 - 15:44

Things change: every business tries to improve what they do and how they do it. From finding new ways to cut costs, better uses for investment dollars, all the way to responding to new competitive threats and correcting missteps, good businesses are always seeking ways to increase value to customers and ultimately improve bottom line operating results. Businesses that fail to evolve with time typically just fail. Invariably some of these challenges will require change in the support systems of the company. Understanding the costs, risks, project management processes and likely benefits of undertaking an information technology initiative is something I frequently see business managers fail in.

The best advice that can be given to any business manager facing a new project is to establish an appropriate level of expectation from the outset. There are a few factors that, if kept in mind during the planning of a project and the evaluation of plan changes, can help to ensure that those expectations are kept at reasonable levels.

Understand that you get out of a project what you put into it. There's an old saying, "You can't get something for nothing." and nowhere is this more true than in technology projects. When you take on a project you are committing to spending the time of your staff and very likely capital commitments as well. Proper project planning with help from an experienced project manager cannot obviate the need for spending time and money on a project, but can help ensure that there is value derived from those time and money commitments.
Understand the role that irrational factors play in expectation setting and project execution. In my experience, many business leaders avoid acknowledging that projects evoke emotions, in project participants including themselves. Yet many times judgments of success or failure and even significant project decisions are rooted in the emotions and perceptions of project team members and stakeholders[2]. There is research showing that habit[3] can effect decisions and acceptance when dealing with technology matters. Understanding these irrational factors and pro-actively managing them rather than ignoring or denying their importance can help ensure they don't derail the project or compromise the value you get out of it.
Understand the value proposition of each desired project outcome/deliverable and not just the project as a whole. When making the decision to undertake a project, it is natural to consider what value the project on the whole will bring relative to its cost . But it is also common to not apply the same value judgments to incremental decisions and outcomes during the course of the project; indeed, then decisions tend to be the most subject to negative impacts from irrational decisions as discussed in point 2. In reality the project on the whole is nothing more than the sum of these smaller decisions and as such it is easy to lose the overall value that a project brings by not applying a value determination to individual project deliverables.

It cannot be understated that experienced project management cannot be substituted with a few broad guidelines. Naturally, good project management is more nuanced than these three broad points, but keeping these ideas in mind as you contemplate your project and plan it sets you on the right course from the outset in terms of expectation.

Projects & Change

Committing to an Information Technology project is committing to changing your way of doing things. It's true there are degrees of change, and that degree tends to be matched with the relative size of the project for your organization, but change nonetheless. Whenever I walk into a project and am told by the project sponsor or executive charged with oversight that the project needs to be sure that things need to, 'happen exactly as they do today,' but somehow better, I know I have an uphill battle. If you have a buggy system that causes many errors, sure you can focus on fixing them in the context of a project without engaging in a wholesale business process re-engineering effort; but even in this case, understanding value and setting success factors must involve identifying and decommissioning error checking and reconciliation processes that compensate for the system errors, and if not then what value are you getting from project (answer: probably little since the aforementioned business processes are really the impact to the business of the errors anyway)? Once you recognize that Information Technology change is really only ever done in support of business change, you can effectively manage it, understand and manage how staff in your organization will react to the changes and extract the maximum value from the project.

Change and Organizational Impacts

"Strategic change isn't typically a bad thing of course, and it's certainly necessary in the highly competitive market that you play in. [...] No company ever went wrong overestimating the negative employee reaction to change."[4] I heard these statements during a management seminar given at an annual meeting of a company for which I once worked. The message of the seminar was that, in order to achieve your strategic implementation goals, you cannot ignore or take for granted the commitment of your staff and the factors that motivate them; and they are not motivated by an altruistic sense of corporate best interest, but rather, and understandably so, by a sense of self-preservation. Change necessarily disrupts work patterns and the unfamiliar and new processes that come with a project inherently change the rules upon which staff believes their survival depends.

Organizational influences and corporate culture have the power to make or break a project, especially larger undertakings, and will do so regardless of managerial directive. Recognizing this force within your organization and understanding that you don't actually control it is an important epiphany for a business manager. Once the nature of corporate culture is recognized, you can start to plan on how to manage it, to coax it along and get it to cooperate and even support the project you're trying to complete. A good project will incorporate a communications plan and work actively to ensure a two way communication between those effected by a project and those on the project team.

Therefore executive managers should think of ways to positively reinforce behaviors that contribute to the success of the project. All too many times I've seen executive managers simply focus on the status quo with staff while saving reward or retribution to the core project team and project managers for the success or failure of the project. This mistaken behavior sends a clear message to the corporate culture that it has no stake in the outcome of the project and that its survival depends on resisting change, not embracing it. Remember: project success cannot be gained through executive edict, rather the staff (and its culture) must be convinced and given proof that its survival is caught up in the success of the project.

Project Management Specifics

This article gives a generalized picture of things to consider when you make a commitment to a project. The next set of articles will get into project details such as project methodology, budgeting, and business cases as well as providing some tools to help manage the process along the way. Keep in mind, however, that just possessing the templates or tools here won't allow just anyone to manage a project successfully just as possessing set of compasses, triangles, and pencils won't turn anyone into an experienced architect; it still takes experience and understanding of the process and how (and when) to apply it to use the tools well.