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Over the past two decades, the project management industry has become increasingly rife with best practices and formal frameworks for achieving project success. However, this proliferation hasn’t changed the fact that most organizations continue to struggle at projects. Indeed, statistics around project failure—especially IT projects—have remained consistently high since at least the mid-1990s, a time that coincides with the rise of the ‘best practices’ industry itself. While it’s important that best practices be understood, it’s equally true that best practices aren’t always the best fit. These frameworks commonly set unrealistic expectations for resource-constrained IT departments, and in their clinical approach, fail to address the day-to-day challenges that project managers face on the front lines.In my experience, I’ve found that a right-sized approach to your project management processes works best. Take what you need from those formal frameworks, and then tailor a process that’s going to work for your organization and for the variety of projects that come your way. Matt Burton,

Research Director, Project Portfolio Management Info-Tech Research Group

If the process doesn’t fit your projects, change the process.

ANALYST PERSPECTIVE

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This Research is Designed For: This Research Will Help You:

This Research Will Assist: This Research Will Help You:

This Research Is Designed For: This Research Will Help You:

This Research Will Also Assist: This Research Will Help Them:

Our understanding of the problem

PMO directors looking to standardize project management processes and get more consistent and reliable data from project teams to help increase visibility.

IT managers who need to encourage skills development in their project managers and team leads.

Develop a standardized project management process to help ensure that all project managers are feeding the portfolio with the appropriate KPIs and status updates.

Develop an ongoing project management training curriculum to help experienced project managers keep their skills fresh and new project leads build up their capabilities.

New or experienced project managers looking to follow industry best practices and who require a comprehensive set of project management tools and templates.

CIOs or other C-suite executives who need to improve the throughput and value of the organization’s project work.

Follow COBIT and PMBOK informed project management processes—and pull from a project management toolkit—that can scale to projects of all sizes.

Provide organizationally appropriate project management standards to help minimize waste and improve project outcomes.

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Resolution

Situation

Complication

Info-Tech Insight

Executive summary

• As an organization, you need to improve project success. Your current project management processes are poorly defined, and projects are commonly plagued by cost and scheduling overruns.

• This lack of project management discipline contributes to stakeholder dissatisfaction and fuels the perception that IT does not deliver value.

• You have access to formal project management frameworks and advice, but you’re not sure what to do with them all. Their advice isn’t immediately tactical, and there aren’t enough hours in the day to implement everything they suggest.

• Your team is resource constrained, and for the most part, members lack any formal project management certification or experience.

• When it’s right, keep it light. A lightweight approach to project management process suffices for the vast majority of IT initiatives. Establish different tiers of PM rigor to ensure that you’re not weighing down potential quick wins in too much process, and to ensure that you’re applying the right amount of rigor to more complex, high-risk initiatives.

• Apply the right tools to the job. Your project management processes will succeed or fail depending on the quality of your artifacts and how they are applied. Build an actionable project management toolkit that can accommodate projects of all sizes and that will help facilitate optimized communications with project stakeholders.

• Put your processes in context. Project management doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If your project management practices don’t inform effective decision making, then your investments in process discipline will be all for nothing. Develop processes that provide a gateway to the “big picture” and help facilitate effective portfolio management practices.

1. Tailor a project management framework to fit your organization. Best practices aren’t always the best fit. Take what you can use from formal frameworks and define a right-sized approach to your project management processes.

2. Make it about project outcomes, not processes. Project management success doesn’t equal project success. Project management processes should be a means to an end (i.e. successful project outcomes), and not an end in themselves.

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Successful projects are the #1 driver of satisfaction with IT

Info-Tech’s CIO Business Vision Survey (N=21,367) has identified a direct correlation between IT project success and overall business satisfaction with IT.

Reported Importance: Initially, when asked to rank the importance of IT services, respondents ranked “projects” low on the list—10 out of a possible 12.

Actual Importance: Despite this low “reported importance,” of those organizations that were “satisfied” to “fully satisfied” with IT, the service that had the strongest correlation to this high satisfaction was “projects,” i.e. IT’s ability to help plan, support, and execute initiatives that help the business achieve its strategic goals.

Info-Tech Business Vision Survey, N = 21,367

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Successful project outcomes depend on effective project management

Project management (PM) is a methodical approach to planning and guiding project processes from start to finish.

Implementing PM processes helps establish repeatable steps and controls that enable project success.

Documentation of PM processes leads to consistent results and dependable delivery on expectations.

While an investment in PM discipline isn’t free, the time and money spent in developing repeatable processes will pay off in terms of improved project success rates and greater stakeholder satisfaction.

There’s no getting around it: if you want consistently successful project results, then you need to invest in project management discipline.

Data from the Project Management Institute (PMI) shows that organizations that have developed cultures around project management discipline are significantly better situated to succeed at projects.

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Project management is the primary discipline separating top IT performers from the rest of the pack

Info-Tech’s research shows that the ability to effectively plan and execute projects is among the top activities that correlate with high IT performance.

DevicesNetwork & Comm. Infrastructure

IT PoliciesService/Help Desk

Client Facing TechnologyData Quality

Business ApplicationsWork Order Execution

Analytical CapabilityWork Order Capacity

Requirements GatheringProject Execution

IT Innovation LeadershipProject Capacity

0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30%

Performance Improvement of Top Performers vs. Average Performers

Our data shows that the ability to right-size project initiation and governance based on capacity forecasts, as well as the ability to drive throughput through project execution, are two of the top three activities that separate top IT performers from average performers.

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Despite its importance, project management remains an Achilles’ heel for the vast majority of organizationsThe statistics around project failure—especially IT projects—have remained consistently high for the last two decades, despite a proliferation of project management best practices.

Only 29% of projects were delivered on time, on budget, and with a satisfactory results in 2015.

—Hass and Fulmer

29%17% of large IT projects fail so badly they threaten the organization’s survival.

—McKinsey & Co.17%

Only 56% of strategic projects meet their original business goals.

—PMI56%

75% of IT executive stakeholders and business leaders believe their projects are “doomed from the start.”

—Geneca

75%The US economy loses $50-$150 billion per year due to failed IT projects.

—Gallup

$50-$150billion

While it’s true that project management failures are common and well reported year-after-year, Info-Tech finds that the barriers to project management success are relatively straightforward to diagnose and—with the right measures—surmountable with just a few tweaks to processes.

On average, 2015 statistics show that 60% of projects are not aligned with organizational strategy.

—Wrike

60%

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[PMBOK] offers a vast body of knowledge to Project Managers, but without the specific guidance to distil the knowledge into practical and actionable methods tailored to different situations. This has resulted in failures and practitioners spending too much time translating the knowledge and not enough time executing and delivering it.

—Lisa Hodges

The biggest barrier to project success is often project management itself

Best practices aren’t always the best fit.Formal project management frameworks like PMBOK and COBIT provide comprehensive approaches to planning, executing, and monitoring projects.

While these frameworks can provide the right amount of rigor and controls for large, complex projects in environments that are optimally funded and resourced, they can prove to be less actionable when applied to medium-to-small initiatives—especially in resource-constrained project environments, like small enterprises or IT departments.

When these formal methodologies are applied without specific tactics, they can lead to quick wins being weighed down by too much process or to project ROI being depleted by excessive PM administrative burdens.

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When applied as a universal standard, PM best practices can stand in the way of the effective standardization of process

PM started as a planning and scheduling tool and PM standards were limited to those areas. Planning and scheduling has since been built into step-wise models, providing an apparently perfect path to follow. That may be troublesome enough but the problem escalated further when new areas, such as people skills, human resources, and ways of dealing with complexity were added to the standards.

When the developers of standards were directed to become more comprehensive and more up to date in terms of their practices, they added issues that were less easy to standardise. This trend was exacerbated when the application of the standard was expanded from covering a few industries in a few countries to all industries in all countries, and from large and complex systems development projects to all types of projects.

—Hällgren et al. “Relevance Lost! A critical review of project management standardisation”

With this history in mind, IT project managers should approach formal frameworks asking, “what can I take from these that will benefit my projects and my team?” rather than attempting to apply them verbatim, at all costs, when and where they might not be applicable. !

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The ability to right-size project planning and controls contributes significantly to IT project throughput

The trick to implementing sustainable project management is to tune process to the needs of the organization (right fit – which depends on culture and maturity) and to the needs of all projects (right scalability – which depends on differences in project scale and complexity).

—Howard Vaughn

Project management planning and controls are necessary for all projects—they just shouldn’t look the same for all types of projects.

Right-sized project management discipline will help you straddle the divide between two equally destructive poles of project chaos:

Find project management success by walking a middle path between too little and too much PM formality.

This pole, common in small IT departments, is essentially the wild west of project execution, lacking a standardization of project management KPIs, tools, and reporting, and without communication and portfolio visibility.

This pole applies a standard methodology to all projects, regardless of type or size, leading to challenges around adoption and adherence, especially when applied to small projects or to a group of leads who lack PM experience.

No PM Processes Excessive PM ProcessesRight-Sized PM Processes

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