Leadership flaws add to IT project failures

More detailed business monitoring is essential

Business leaders need to understand IT better

A lack of governance and an increasingly fast rate of technology change are contributing to high rates of IT project failures.

Management consultant PricewaterhouseCoopers told Computing that 50 per cent of projects are late or over budget and 25 per cent fail completely. Just 25 per cent succeed.

A survey by industry forum CIO Connect says more than 90 per cent of chief information officers (CIOs) believe poor monitoring by the business is allowing failing projects to continue for too long.

The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) is calling on business leaders to improve their understanding of the IT goals within their organisations.

Mary Chapman, chief executive of CMI, says CIOs are key to improving IT governance by engaging with other managers when projects are failing.

‘Projects fail when business leaders lack a broad view and do not recognise that changes occur in the environment that are no longer aligned with the project,’ said Chapman.

Ian McCaig, chief executive of Lastminute.com, says CIOs cannot be expected to be the point of governance because they do not have a view across the whole organisation.

‘You cannot tell a CIO the project is behind because HR has not been able to get through a legal progress or it has fallen behind because the marketing campaign could not get the ad space to run it,’ he said.

‘Most projects fail because by the time a leadership team understands a project is going into a risk stage, it’s too late.’

McCaig says governance must sit separately to retain its impartiality, because it is the compass for the business in terms of technology-based change projects.

JP Rangaswami, CIO of BT Global Services, says external sensors monitoring environmental changes can stop p rojects failing. ‘These changes may be shifts in pricing or in what competitors are doing, as well as the things that really differentiate us,’ he said.

‘Failing projects require transparency and the knowledge that it is collectively beneficial to say it is going off the rails.’