Over half of IT projects fall short of expectation

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 fewer than half of projects met expectations. To counter this, 63 percent reduce the scope of projects, 31 percent reduce quality and performance, and 45 percent increase budget.

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

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

HP consulting manager Dave Clarke said that there has not been much improvement in IT project management despite the well-documented failures.

“The consensus is that demands in IT continue to grow and outstrip delivery,” he added.

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.”

However, Ravenscroft added that by creating joint teams between business and IT, Vodafone has 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.

Throwing more money at a problem is not the right approach, Ravenscroft warned. “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.”