IT Projects
Faster, Efficient and On Time
1Organizations and governments worldwide will spend about $1 trillion this year on IT projects. Recent data suggested only about 35 percent of those projects are likely to be completed on time and on budget, with all their originally specified features and functions. Many projects, perhaps 20 percent, will be abandoned, often after multimillion-dollar investments—and the biggest projects will fail most often.
IT organizations, whether they develop applications for internal use or offer development services to others, are under increasing pressures. These pressures translate into a need for executing projects faster and more efficiently.
Moving work to lower cost countries like India has provided an excellent avenue for reducing costs. At the same time, the actual performance of projects as measured by the ability to deliver them on time, within the original budget and with full scope has not changed. IT projects are notorious for their poor performance in these respects. For example, according to the Standish Group’s Chaos Study nearly 60% of all IT projects are delivered with less functionality than originally promised.
Complexity of IT Work
An IT organization offers two kinds of support to the parent organization. It is a service provider expected to meet a defined level of response time in dealing with service requests or trouble tickets (service level agreements). It is also expected to do projects to develop and upgrade applications to meet emerging user needs. Often, at least some of the resources are shared among both types of work.
The project work is highly challenging, with great uncertainty in customer requirements, technology challenges, and the need to integrate multiple software systems and platforms. Testing and trouble-shooting can be especially challenging with thousands of test cases and a large number of defects. It is common to face shortage of key resources, delayed integrations, late drops into testing and all manner of almost insurmountable challenges.
The service work has high fluctuations in demand with peaks and valleys in resource needs, while service level agreements commit the organization to aggressive response times. Taken together with the specialized resources required to deal with many different systems and platforms, the challenge of providing high performance with limited budgets is enormous.
It is not unusual in these organizations for people to work very long hours, for things to be delivered at the last minute, scope to be compromised and stress to be very high.
Organizations often look to improve process discipline, adopt the latest methodologies in software development, automation tools, reuse practices, etc. to find some way to meet these challenges. From a management standpoint they adopt detailed planning and tracking, phase gate models with milestones, measurements of all kinds of performance in an attempt to tame this environment – unfortunately with little or no impact.
It is clear that any solution for this challenging environment requires a departure from traditional thinking.
Execution Management is the Breakthrough
Realization Technologies’ execution management system is an unorthodox but common sense solution for IT organizations. The management rules embedded in execution management accept and manage the uncertainties inherent in this environment. A robust implementation of these rules produces results that are almost unbelievable. Project cycle times are shrunk by 20-25%, throughput of completed projects increases by 15-25% while on time performance against original commitments improves dramatically.
Below is a sample of results from a variety of IT organizations:
|
B E F O R E |
A F T E R |
Customer Experience Systems – Customized SW Development for Telecommunications
Amdocs |
Market pressure to reduce cost and cycle time. 8 projects in crisis requiring CEO level attention in 2007. |
14% increase in revenue/man-month. 20% reduction in cycle time. 0 project in crisis in 2008. |
Next Generation Wireless Technology Product Development
Airgo Networks |
Cycle time from first silicon to production for 1st generation was 19 months. |
Cycle time from first silicon to production for 2nd generation was 8 months. |
Telecomm Switches Design, Development and Upgrades
Alcatel-Lucent |
300-400 active projects with 30+ deliveries a month. Lead times were long. On-time delivery was poor. |
Throughput increased by 45% per person. Lead times shortened by 10-25%. On-time delivery improved to 90+%. |
Customized Software Development
Alna Software |
Growth was stagnating, becoming insufficient to secure market position. |
Throughput increased by 14% in the first 6 months. Cycle time reduced by 25% and project completions increased 17% with over 90% on-time delivery. |
IT Projects
Celsa Group |
15 SAP functionality projects were completed per month. |
SAP functionality project completions increased by 30% to 20 projects a month. |
Food Preparation and Packaging
Oregon Freeze Dry |
72 sales projects completed per year. |
171 sales projects completed per year. 52% increase in throughput-dollars. |
Marketing/Publishing Support
Rapid Solution Group |
Projects were always late. Lead times were not acceptable. |
On-time delivery improved by 30%. Lead times reduced by 25%. |
|
1Source: SEI – Software Engineering Institute
