Wow! It's been a while since I was last here. Happy New Year! The last six months have flown by as we've acquired new projects, clients and colleagues. Plus, as readers of our newsletter will know, we've spent the first three months of this year rationalising our servers onto a single cloud-based platform. This has been an enormous undertaking and I'm absolutely delighted by its success, which was managed with absolute minimum disruption to our clients.
But in my last post I was starting a series of posts about why large IT projects fail. I had originally written a list of all the items I want to cover and this had gone missing. After I started sketching out this post I found it again and I was pleased to see I'd been consistent in what I see as the first thing to consider, and that is scope.
When I'm talking about IT or trying to explain it to non-technical folk, I often find that talking about building is a good analogy. So, let's imagine that you're going to build an extension for a new kitchen.
First of all, you need to consider the rest of your house. You might not be doing any work there but there's plumbing and electricity to consider, and the stresses on the existing infrastructure. This, then, is not the time to discuss whether the bathroom needs renovating although if that's being done at the same time, you need to make sure you aren't moving a pipe that you're planning to feed into the kitchen.
Similarly, then, for your new project, before you start talking about what it needs to do, what constraints are there? If it has to exchange information with other systems, how will that work? Have you checked whether those other systems have their own changes planned?
Next, focus on the essentials. What needs to to be done in this initial project? It might be sensible to defer considerations such as floor tiles, painting and decorating, and kitchen furniture. Sure, the kitchen might not be usable until these are in place but putting those to one side, you can focus on a manageable amount of work that is quite different in its nature. Your joiner is unlikely to want to sit in on a conversation about Italian tiles.
So, for your IT project, look at what needs to be achieved. Yes, you might want a letter printing facility but that's academic if your client data isn't right. Of course, you want to know that that will be a requirement at some point - you want to bear these things in mind - but for now you need to focus on the core deliverable. This enables you to keep your team smaller, which facilitates communication and eases change management. It also means you are less vulnerable to changes in requirements - you have a smaller target - and when those do arise, impact analysis is simpler.
Once you have reached this point, you can start getting into the detail of what you're building. Even on a project that has been scoped carefully, it's astounding how much there is to be done once you get into the detail. I think this is where a lot of big projects go wrong: a sensibly scoped project can look a bit unambitious, a bit limited in what it's delivering, so people think they might as well do a bit more while they're at it. Once you get into the detail., it's suddenly unmanageable. In 2004 I was on a project based in New York that was on a three month delivery cycle yet consistently failing to deliver. Really, all I did was cut the scope right back. There was a certain amount of scorn on the project, not least from the development team, who, I seem to remember, thought we could do it all in two weeks. We did it just in time for the next release date. We repeated the process twice more and, when I finished we had a successfully delivering project and a happy user community. It wasn't rocket science.
One final consideration. In our example, we're building a new kitchen but when that's done, we'll need to move all the kitchenware across from the old one. And we need to make sure there's room for that large steam-punk coffee machine. In system terms, I'm talking about data migration. You need to ensure the new system can handle your existing data and have a plan in place for moving it across. And rehearse that process, too. The worst project I ever worked on hadn't rehearsed its data migration. With a new system going live on the Monday, they kicked off the data migration on Friday night. By Sunday afternoon, only half the data had moved across. Rather than aborting, Monday saw this telecommunications company based in Britain with half its accounts on one system and half on the other. It was a disaster, operationally and from a PR perspective.
That's my guide to scoping then. Think about the big picture, don't be over ambitious. Simple, eh?
