A survey just out by HP and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) has found that many European IT workers are not being held responsible for delivering projects late.
The survey found that 51 per cent of European IT professionals said there would be no risk to their job, compared to 33 per cent in Asia and 22 per cent in the Americas. The reason for this is that the expectation that projects will be delivered successfully are embarrassingly low - according to the Standish Group only around 25 per cent are successful.
Celona, experts in application transformation projects for Tier 1 Telecommunications operators, comment: "We see complex application-level migrations fail all the time - often because critical components such as data issues are overlooked and not given sufficient resources at the right time. Worse still, performing a complex migration is like trying to do acrobatics on a moving pavement: the business doesn't stop just because you want to transform your infrastructure. And time becomes the enemy, as the longer it takes the more the business has moved and changed, all of which affects the project. Once you've set off on the moving pavement, changing direction is hard.
So if the business requirements have changed, the project is no longer aligned to business needs. A different approach is to use "progressive migration". This allows the business to control the speed and therefore the risk of the migration in the early stages, allowing it to speed up as it progresses, delivering results early on."
Industry stats make grim reading. Kognitio released a survey this year which found that it doesn't help matters that 57 per cent of decision makers don't have the information they need to run their business optimally. Plus, 56 per cent admitted that they had been discouraged from undertaking data migration projects because of the risk, cost, time and resource needed for such projects.
Successful IT projects - including very complex ones - that are delivered on time, to budget and with a low risk profile have certain common features. Typically, they combine business and technological strategies and deliver against both, and they also have senior management buy-in and support.
How successful are your application migration projects? Celona suggests you ask yourself these five uncomfortable questions:
[Managing IT projects is different from most other management tasks because of the asymmetrical investment/risk profile of these projects. They often require large up-front investment but the risk of discovering that it is not working out after all lie towards the end of the project. You need to try to align risk and investment better through consequent analysis, revision cycles, stringent issue management and generally through "progressive migration" as Celona call it.
There is some literature about this issue, most of it not worth reading because it fails to identify the main issues. I would recommend Lientz & Larssen: Risk Management for IT Projects, ISBN 0-7506-8231-0, as a good introduction as well as a practical recipe for IT projects, including change management. --Ed].
Related links: (Open in a new window.)
www.celona.com
Taken from Information Security Bulletin.