Why internal IT projects fail – relaoded

Lately I’ve blogged about internal IT projects that do fail and one of the main reasons: lack of Product Owner (Why big projects fail in corporate IT).
Today let me emphasize another major reason: often the team who’s in charge of a project … will leave (I’d say run away as fast as light) as soon as the project is complete. And usually ‘complete’ means ‘when we are exhausted of fighting with the supplier for bugs, change requests and new features’. And all this means that the project is not complete at all. And in any case we know it will evolve.
What is stimulating the project team, in such a context, to work effectively? Work for simplicity? Work to establish a system that will grow up or change in the future weeks / months / years? Are they measured in any way on these goals? Or are they measured on ‘close this fuxxing project quickly that we have already spent all the money they gave us’?
PierG

BAU – what happens to projects when they finish

When a SW project finish, a Project Manager is a happy, a company can send the bill and … the team moves to another project leaving the code to the lucky maintenance team.

Is the project team deeply motivated to build a product who can last for long? Is the maintenance team skilled (and willing and has the right incentive) to make the system working better and better?

Mmmm….

Here is a possible recipe:

Form long-lived teams around applications/products, or sets of features.  A team works from a prioritised backlog of work that contains a mix of larger initiatives, minor enhancements, or BAU-style bug fixes and maintenance.  Second-level support should be handled by people in the product team.  Everyone in the team should work with common process and a clear understanding of technical design and business vision.

via Projects are evil and must be destroyed | Evan Bottcher.

What do you think?
PierG

Where do RFPs come from? – Strange Loops

And then they say 70% of IT projects fail

via Where do RFPs come from? | strange loops.

This is for my IT followers that are fan of Request For Proposal or usless things like that 🙂

PierG