"We know why projects fail; we know how to prevent their failure - so why do they still fail?" - Martin Cobb
If you are involved in delivering ICT projects, you must have heard this phrase coined more than once - I came across this well over a decade ago (and it was not a new discovery then!) - what is it that drives failure in projects, and more importantly - where are we failing to make the improvements in our execution that would prevent this failure?
Entropy
A project can be a complex environment - especially business application implementation projects tend to have many stakeholders and even more moving components.
What applies to physics in the form of the second law of thermodynamics, applies to projects as well - over time they will revert to an increasing state of disorder. Unless decisive, and directed action is continuously taken. We have broken up these actions into nine areas: user participation, requirements management, communication, business orientation, project team, project planning, risk management, technical environment, and quality management. Each of these areas has a number of factors that determine if the entropy is increasing without control, or if counter measures have been put in place.
Project assessment
The first step is to do an assessment of your project - not only once, but a periodic measurement of the processes in place that counter entropy. This is not an assessment based on how the project has been set up initially - that only counts at the start of the project - it is an assessment of the processes in place and in use at the moment of assessing. If you cannot find evidence that something is in use right now - then it is safe to assume it isn't. Project assessments can cost you thousands of dollars, and in some cases, this prevents their use (if budgets are already under pressure, the last thing project managers do is to allocate more budget to things that were not initially in the plan). Still, having an insight into where you need to focus attention into bringing the project back in line can save you a lot of resources otherwise used to spin wheels without making progress. Quite a conundrum. Or is it?
Does "free of charge" fit in your budget?
We have developed an online do-it-yourself assessment to quickly gauge your project's resilience to entropy. Typically, this takes less then 15 minutes to complete, and you receive an overall project assessment score immediately. Within 3 business days, you will receive a score report broken down by area. Zero cost to you.
How is this possible? Well, we have taken our experience 20+ years in delivering business applications, distilled that into a data collection survey, and made this available online to you, for free. We will spend some time collating the area scores for you, and send them to you - again at no cost or obligation. If this is beneficial to you in identifying where you can improve your project, then great! If you do need help with tackling the entropy issue, or if you want to have a more comprehensive quality assessment, then these are available from Aurelian Group. Regardless, we are pleased if this assessment is of use to you