68% of all IT projects fail

Yet, consulting firms make tons of money, isn't that amazing? Good article in the Financial Post this week, the author does a pretty job of painting a gloomy picture of our industry and blame human beings - not technology per se - for screwing up projects.

Money quote: The first failure is that of the project manager to adequately understand the business's requirements. This might be due to not talking to enough users of the system or not talking to managers and really understanding the problem it is supposed to solve.

The thing is, moronic clients can quickly say what they DON'T want with unprecedented level of details, but when prompted to say what they WANT, you are left with a blank stare. They're like kiddos to whom you serve a broccoli soup, they say yuck, you ask them what kind of soup they want, and they answer I don't know.

You can put clients into long therapy session to extract bits of information here and there, you can fill half a page maybe (using large font size), and this becomes the scope of work for a multi-million dollar project. We'll figure out the details down the road, the client says. Since consulting usually work on a hourly basis, it's a match made in heaven.

The second is a failure to involve the systems users in its design, which often results in the users rejecting the system, even if its design meets the business's requirements.

It takes way too long to involve system users in the decision process, they don't know jack about what they want either - just like their bosses, and they'll have conflicting views. Did Steve Jobs involved focus groups when designing the iPod? No, because people don't know anything and they have a hard time defining something that they can only dream of. So when designing an IT system piggybacking an overly complex business process, you can bet your pants that we won't involve end users. It's a pain to manage. Better knock on the door of the dude managing IT budgets, he should be your next best friend.

The third, which Prof. Neufeld believes to be the most important, is a failure of senior management to get involved in the project, whether it is the chief executive, chief financial officer or chief information officer.

Senior management is sitting in their comfy chair and planning their next golf tournament, the last thing they want to hear is that their business is so twisted with layers of insanity built upon layers of nonsense that it's impossible to design an IT system to meet the requirements. That would require straightening the business, and it's as much fun as a getting a vasectomy performed by a plumber. Therefore senior managers delegate the job to hapless middle managers who are not authorized to make any decisions (hence the word "middle").

Let me tell you something. If people could spend their days on YouTube instead of making important decisions that would improve everyone's life, they'd do it without hesitating. It's human nature.