Technology Project Success
Improving the effectiveness and business-level impact of technology initiatives.
Business and IT executives spend a great deal of time and energy defining the right strategy for their company. Out of the strategy usually arises a list of projects that the IT team will execute. Even when the strategy is spot-on for the requirements of the business, if technology projects are not successful, the strategy will fail.
In research we’ve conducted, we’ve discovered that many organizations struggle with project success rates. While our research indicates very few projects fail outright, many under-deliver against the desired value and results that were expected and forecasted at the beginning of the project.
The truly difficult part of this strategic challenge is how much it costs businesses. In our experience, the hard costs associated with a project failing or under-delivering pale in comparison to the opportunity costs where an organization could not capitalize on a market opportunity window that then closed. Technology project success rates are clearly linked to business growth, expansion, and profitability.
In interviews with CIOs and Enterprise Architects we consistently have heard comments such as:
- Many projects deliver far lower levels of value and performance to their organization than what was expected at the beginning of the project.
- End-users sometimes outright refuse to use a service once in production because it does not meet their expectations.
- Projects are habitually over budget and miss deadlines.
- Business leaders do not see the value of a project during development and may under-fund or cancel it.
- The final technology product functions differently from how users are accustomed, so they find a way to work around it, essentially nullifying the solution.
The Cogentes solution
Cogentes addresses these issues by providing expert analysis, creative problem solving, and solutions implementation from our senior consultants. Our approach is to understand how an organization has leveraged its people, process and technology to create value. Specifically, we will:
- Interview key executive and operations staff first and gain a working sense of the business plan’s objectives.
- Interview IT leaders and understand the IT operations model they have put in place and the history of success of that model.
- Understand the history of investments in people, process and technology to see what the money path tells us about culture, values and decision-making strategy.
- Analyze everything we learn from the discovery process and uncover where the fundamental disconnects lie between business objectives and the actual operating model.
- Rationalize the best possible approach for closing the gap between the intended results and the actual results of the operating model.
- Create an implementation plan to substantially narrow the gap between intended and actual results by developing new approaches to leveraging people, process and technology.
- Work with our clients to implement the plan we’ve developed.
- Make adjustments to the plan based on actual business operating conditions.
- Monitor the success of the plan over time and continue to refine it as necessary.
