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The Recipe for a-Successful IT Project
Three things that any IT project head dreads to hear are missed deadlines, cost over runs, and unsatisfied user expectations. These can all be avoided if you use the right ingredients for managing your IT project. We tell you about some of them
Anil Chopra
Monday, June 18, 2007
This year, for the Best IT Implementation Awards, we decided to go beyond our
regular analysis of the various IT projects. We decided to explore other aspects
of IT implementations as well. For this, we interacted with many of the IT
project heads, to find out their secrets for managing a successful project
implementation. In this interaction, we also got into non-IT issues like key
skill sets that every IT project head must possess, how to choose and build the
right IT team, which pitfalls to avoid, the challenges involved in running an IT
project, and much more. Here's what we found.
A clear understanding of requirements
The first thing that we asked the IT project heads was to identify the
single most important ingredient for a successful IT deployment. As it was an
open-ended question, we received various kinds of responses. But most of them in
some way or the other hinted at only one conclusion-a crystal clear
understanding of the requirement. What do you really want to achieve with your
project? What's the killer need for doing it? That sounds like quite an obvious
answer, you may say. But when handling complex deployments, the obvious often
becomes obscure. So understanding the real requirement of an IT project is a
must, but the fact is, it's easier said than done. Let's understand this with an
example.
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You may feel a strong need to deploy virtualization technology in your data
center. You understand what virtualization technology is, and know that it can
improve the utilization of servers in your data center. You could even reduce
the downtime of your servers by taking backups of the virtual disk images of
your servers.
The trouble is, your management does not understand this requirement, as it's
too technical. So it has to be translated into tangible benefits that everyone
can understand. For instance, one tangible benefit could be that you want to cut
down significantly on the electricity and air-conditioning bills in your data
center.
Or, you want to defer the purchase of new servers to the next quarter. Both
of these result in cost saving for the company, and are easily understandable.
Now you can build a case on how virtualization technology can help you meet both
or either of these requirements. A good project head would easily be able to
define the real requirements for an IT project, no matter how large it is.
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