Commentary: Good things come to those who DON’T wait |
This article was originally published in German in is report.
You can email Carsten Bange, the author of this section, if you have any comments, observations or user experiences to add. Last updated on April 10th, 2007 .
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IT project managers face a double dilemma. As IT matures, software solutions and systems become more complex. This, in turn, makes data and process integration as well as quality assurance very costly and time-consuming endeavors in full-fledged IT landscapes. At the same time, business processes are evolving at a faster pace within the company itself as well as for its customers and competitors.
Many companies already know that professional project management, well-trained personnel and quality software have a strong influence on the overall success of a project. Yet, they often overlook the correlation between project benefits and implementation speed. As a rule of thumb, the longer it takes to put an IT project into operation, the less value it will deliver. In The OLAP Survey 6, actual users of Business Intelligence systems stated that the benefits of the software implementation sank with each additional month needed to employ the project. Furthermore, the named problems rose in relation to the diminishing benefits. In fact, projects that produced a working solution in less than six months ranked better in various qualitative and quantitative aspects than those that took longer.
Instead of a long-term, 150% realization of every last requirement, companies should focus their energy on a fast, pragmatic implementation of a single aspect within an IT project. “Stove piping” offers one approach in which users quickly reap the benefits of a complex project. Here, project managers build a complete solution from the data connection or interface level to a working end-user tool. Instead of taking a horizontal approach of planning tasks and system levels, the stove pipe vertically drives through the system landscape from the data sources to the actual users. Although the results only address a fraction of the desired solution, the project management team becomes familiar with all levels of the technical implementation and can begin gathering feedback from actual users to work into the next phase of the project. This process also addresses the fact that most users have difficulty in clearly defining their requirements at the beginning of a project. Many users only realize how a solution could support their work after seeing a live application - at which point they often have new ideas or suggestions for improvement.
Agile software development methods, which expedite projects and take user feedback into account at the earliest possible stage, should apply for all IT projects in the days of “complexware” and dynamic, changing processes. Companies should aim for several small projects with three to six month implementations rather than long, drawn-out mammoth missions. After all, mammoths did not adapt to the climatic changes leading up to the end of the last Ice Age — and now you can only find them in museums.
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