Andrews Consulting Group

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Fall 2002

Raising the I.T. Project Success Rate

Business people everywhere are frantically trying to determine exactly what their company should do about the Internet. The answer most often involves launching projects even though the success rate for Information Technology (IT) projects over the years has been dismal. Ignoring the problem is not a good option, so what should be done?

The root cause of most project failures is simple projects have a natural tendency to become too complex.

The solution is therefore also easy to state - keep things simple. In practice doing so is usually much harder than it should be because of the way most organizations think about projects.The problems we attack with projects are usually exceedingly complex. This is understandable because simple problems tend to solve themselves. The strong temptation is therefore to use the project as an opportunity to solve every facet of the problem. In theory this is the right approach but in practice it tends to fail almost every time.

Over the past two decades Andrews Consulting Group has refined a unique set of principles that we use to help our clients organize and manage projects. One of the key assumptions behind our approach is that it is essential to break complex projects into a series of simpler efforts that can be completed quickly. This simple idea can be applied to any complex business project with good results - in fact, after experiencing it as a part of our project work a fair number of our clients have adopted it for their own use in other areas.

Breaking large projects into numerous smaller ones has many benefits. One of the most powerful is that it reduces the chance that the nature of the problem being addressed will change. The shorter the life of the project the less chance that the assumptions on which it has been built will change.

A very simple but powerful concept behind our approach, which we call ithe RITE Approach (Revolutionizing IT Effectively), is to determine the end date for the project before defining exactly what the project is intended to accomplish. This sounds strange but is highly effective in practice.

iThe RITE Approach starts by setting a time, never very far in the future, during which something concrete can be implemented that will alleviate an important aspect of the overall problem. Solving every aspect of the problem in this timeframe is neither necessary or even desirable. Once the completion date has been defined, the project team then comes up with a project plan that they are confident can be finished by then. The project is then judged by whether the cost and effort will be worth the benefits to be gained.

Letting time determine project scope is the opposite of the approach normally taken. The results our clients have achieved taking this approach have also been the opposite of the norm -few failures, satisfied users, and frequently delighted executives.

--David Andrews, CEO, Andrews Consulting Group

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