Dinner with friends on a Friday night is something everyone can relate to. For me, After a week of managing AI projects, juggling resources and monitoring progression, I’m ready to unwind, preferably with a glass of wine, good food and great conversion. I’m fortunate enough to have ridiculously smart friends, their advice and experiences are worth their weight in gold; so, on this particular evening, it wasn’t a completely unwelcome shift in the conversation when we drifted onto the subject of failed IT projects. Most of the time the opinions and experiences of the group are varied, I say X and someone else says Y and the discussion evolves from there. On this subject and on this particular evening though, the experiences and opinions were unanimous:
Big technology projects always fail
And by “big” we didn’t just mean the budget, we also meant:
- Ambition
- Value for the business
- Time to complete
- Complexity
- Scope
- Level of innovation
- Resources delegated/required
At the end of the evening, riding home on my bike, over the canals of Amsterdam, the conclusion that stayed with me was:
Any factor that increases the mass of a technology project, negatively effects the outcome.
A slightly pessimistic conclusion to make after such a great evening, especially since I’ve also seen technology projects succeed. So what is the crucial success factor that makes an innovative technology project succeed?
After a week of thinking things through, reading numerous articles written by colleagues and putting pen to paper, I’ve decided that the key success factors for a technology project to succeed are:
Structure & Discipline
+
Incremental reduction
A disclaimer here for project managers: This is in no way suggesting that a project that is underfunded, under resourced and over promised can possibly succeed, the assumption here is that the basics have been managed.
If you agree with my conclusion then it shouldn’t come as a surprise that all the successful projects I’ve been involved in have worked within an Agile-Scrum framework. Using a system where the core practice is breaking a project into its smaller component parts is a no brainer. Especially if you combine it with the structure and discipline of the sprint, retrospectives, burn downs and velocity tracking.
(apologies to any readers who are not versed in the terminology I’m using here, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me with any queries you might have on this subject: contact me)
But is Agile-Scrum really the key to a successful project and, more specifically: is it so great for an innovative technology project or, for that matter, any project outside of software development?
In 2024 we can all agree that there are plenty of Agile-Scrum projects that fail and by now everyone knows that it isn’t a magic bullet. So why do even these projects fail? In my humble opinion the key factors for failure are:
- Many rules just don’t work outside of the context of software development
- Daily stand-ups are not compatible with resource delegation and availability
- Velocity is not measured, burn up and burn down isn’t monitored
- Complexity is scored, but the team doesn’t understand the impact or tech
So how do you overcome these obstacles, how can you successfully navigate this mine field?
The key to overcoming all of this is simple: it’s a person.
A coach (and I mean like a sport coach). You can call them a project manager, a “Scrum master”, Project lead or Project administrator. The title doesn’t really matter. It’s someone that can think pragmatically, manage people constructively and is responsible for the outcomes and process of the project. I’m convinced that even on the cutting edge of a technology project it’s the soft skills that make all the difference. Sure you need a product owner with brains, a business owner with muscle and developers with body to implement a new innovative technology in an organisation, but they all need a coach, a personal trainer. Someone that tells them to keep going despite the setbacks, someone that thinks in terms of solutions and someone that knocks on doors and gets things moving.
So if I ever revisit this subject with my friends on a “gezellig” (Dutch word for a congenial atmosphere) Friday night. I’ll say that I think I know what the answer is.
If you manage those big bad tech projects properly, break them down incrementally, apply discipline liberally, think pragmatically and communicate personally they simply cannot fail.
Disclaimer: of course they can. 😉
Thanks for reading,
Kai