Hello to All!

Welcome back. What makes it so hard to deliver the business value of IT in key projects? Part of the challenge is defining the business value of IT, and part of it is delivering it.

If we leave the “define” off the table for now, let’s look at delivering the value–and one really key element of why projects fail to deliver value, and what can be done about it.

The primary reason projects fail is not in delivery, its not in some tough technical challenge, its not in changing priorities. It is in the failure of the organization to adopt the change.

According to the Change Management Learning Center, based on a survey of 288 companies, the top obstacles to successful change are employee resistance at all levels: front-line, middle managers, and senior managers and inadequate senior management sponsorship. For more information visit www.change-management.com

Prosci offers a good set of tools for managing organizational change, and we are looking into adding some of their tools to our adoption process consulting. They highlight the key problems as employee resistance and lack of senior sponsorship. Resistance is fueled by lack of understanding, comfort with the status quo, fear of loss, and corporate culture of change. Failure of senior sponsorship is evidenced by not visibly supporting the change for the lifecycle, delegating all responsibility down, not communicating the need for the change from on high, and underestimating the need to manage the “people side” of the change process.

Evergreen has built organizational change management principles into its consulting approach–which we call “adoption curve.” A project is not a success until a pre-determined degree of adoption occurs and is maintained for a period of time. We begin this process at the start of a project, by defining clear outcomes for the effort, aligning it with the senior sponsor’s needs, and establishing clear expectations of what we need from them during the project.

Sometimes it causes a proposed project to be dropped, as the value can’t support the total effort–which is a totally acceptable outcome. Because the alternative will almost certainly be a failure–as expectations and costs are clearly unrealistic.

Cheers-

Don

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