Saturday, September 17, 2005

Why Enterprise Software Rollouts Fail

You know the old quote - "A man who does not learn from his mistakes is doomed to repeat them". The message is obvious - Learn from your mistakes. Even better - and a lot less embarrassing - is to learn from other people's mistakes. If you can find a good report of a project that went awry, written by someone in the know, read it and learn. This short article gives a few good ideas for avoiding problems experienced during a software implementation project.
Why Enterprise Software Rollouts Fail
It's easy to publish news about successes. Publishing news about problems and how they could have been avoided is a public service. Anyone who does it deserves our thanks.

posted by G McHardy @ 8:09 PM, Read More...  
3 comments links to this post

3 Comments:

At 11:25 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Maybe a weak excuse for software project failure...but in my experience, project creep is the number one cause. IT folks are tinkerers by nature and are easily taken on a tangent by the technology itself. We are addicted to change, while the PMBOK tries to restrain creativity. I'm a PMP (6 years) but would identify myself as a "techie" before claiming PMP.

 
At 12:10 PM, Blogger G McHardy said...

Good point. We do see a lot of instances where the organisation prides itself on either technical expertise or customer focus - and either of these becomes a reason for allowing the scope to creep.
An example of technical scope creep is to make the (software) product more reusable - good idea but is it in the budget?
On the customer focus side, the encouragement is to say Yes to requests for new features without analysing the cost or effort.

 
At 6:39 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

To add another issue to consider. In a very long project, there will be instances where a supporting piece of software may have several updates to that code, which may affect the intended outcome. There are in fact times when "penny wise and pound foolish" is reality. I've been involved with some rather rigid management styles that have managed themselves right out of business. To ignore changes that are happening around the project, and forage through without having our antennas up, is just plain dumb.

 

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