Study shows persistent project problems

Many IT endeavours are still falling short of expectations, according to an in-depth survey of IT project failure carried out by the Economist Intelligence Unit on behalf of HP.

The poll suggested that in the UK, 57 percent of respondents felt less than half of projects met expectations. To counter this, sixty-three percent reduce the scope of projects while 31 percent reduce quality and performance, and 45 percent increase budget. Forty percent of UK respondents said outsourcing generates problems versus 15 percent in the US.

Experts warned that large projects pose an increasingly difficult challenge for IT managers.

Dave Clarke, HP pre-sales business consulting manager, said, “When things are going wrong the consequences are bigger. The consensus is that demands in IT continue to grow and outstrip ability to deliver.”

HP Europe general manager for software David Quantrell said, “If you think about projects such as the NHS, there are multiple tiers of outsourcing whereas in the US it’s much less. In the UK you often see nested queues of requests.”

Ian Ravenscroft, head of IT operations at Vodafone, said, “Competition drives the need for change and that translates to requirements on technology. If we can’t keep up, the backlog just builds and builds and builds.”

However, Ravenscroft said that by creating joint teams between business and IT, Vodafone had been able to get around the often cited issue of misunderstandings between the two. “If IT sees itself as separate from the business it will be treated that way,” he said.

Ravenscroft added that throwing more money at a problem is not the right approach. “You should only spend money once to develop a technology solution, but if you build the right hardware architecture you can scale it and provision very, very quickly,” he said.

Ravenscroft also suggested that using technology for self-service was becoming a more significant way to remove human inputs.

“Increasingly, customers are quite happy to deal with technology directly. IT automation is eroding the layer that sits between the customer and the technology. Sometimes customers define their service by touch-points including self service.”