We’ve found that most teams who are responsible for IT or software development projects face a set of unique, but common problems:
- IT/software development projects take longer and cost more than anticipated. This is well documented, and with rough math, about 77% of these projects fail.
- Understanding how the project is going is too difficult. There’s a game of telephone between those responsible for the outcome, the actual developers, the consulting management, and all of the other stakeholders. Much of the information shared is overly technical, incomplete, or in various tools and formats. As a result, project owners and those doing the work waste valuable time trying to get updates and making sure the project is on track.
- Translation between development and the business is often unclear. Oftentimes, those responsible are not developers themselves, and struggle to marry up the technical details with the progress and outcomes. This is bi-directional: requirements to the development teams are often unclear, vague, or overly specific; and updates to the project team don’t provide clarity for the various groups.
Though these problems seem unrelated, they all share a commonality: they’re mostly people issues, not technology issues. It’s about different experiences and skills, divergent goals, and information sharing. Right now, the information about how the project is going is scattered across the codebase, product specifications, standards documents, and project management tickets and comments. This makes it very difficult for teams to understand and re-direct projects through the process, and to success.
Project owners, IT, analytics, consultants, constituents, and engineering all have skin in the game. But they don’t all have the visibility they need. As soon as the massive amount of planning for a project is done, the realization sets in that it won’t go as well as hoped.
