Should underperformance be acceptable?

Posted on 13 December 2007 by Tim Howell

Recent research released from Tata Consulting Services indicates that one in three companies' IT projects fail to perform against expectations.

No surprise there for anyone who has been involved in IT projects.

What is surprising is this: 43% of organizations say that their business managers and the Board accept problems as the norm. Put a different way, that means that almost half of the organizations involved in the survey expect such projects to run this way and will, therefore, accept underperformance. Is this really acceptable?
Two of the key common problems cited for such failures are overruns on time (cited by 62% of respondents) and budget (49%). Both these factors are usually intrinsically linked – time is money, as they say.

At the end of the day, such figures can be put down to one thing: failure to execute. Execution requires people to get the right tasks done, in the right order, on time.
Admittedly, IT projects can be particularly complex, typically involving multiple internal and external resources. As one commentator noted:

Given the number of technology implementation disasters, Tata’s results aren’t all that surprising. Big enterprise projects are difficult and require a lot of things–business processes, people, customization, training and financial support–to line up. More often than not these moving parts don’t line up.

Software is one solution to this problem, but traditional project management tools are typically too complex to use and update, and the information project plans contain is out of date as soon as it's published. Also, given the myriad tasks in a typical project, are project plans really the best way to manage hundreds of small tasks?

ActionThis has been designed to align these “moving parts” and make sure that action items get done. We don’t claim to replace the communication and project management tools you’re using right now – we complement these tools to help drive successful outcomes.

In early 2008, we’ll be taking this one step further, providing synchronization with Microsoft Project so that plans can be defined in Project, and a core set of milestones can be defined, with ActionThis managing and driving all of the associated discrete tasks through to completion, updating the plan with real world data along the way.

Using ActionThis, with or without Project integration, will inevitably drive people to finish what they start, helping to ensure that underperformance, and missing goals and deadlines, are a thing of the past.

Tim Howell, CMO

Filed under: General