The Grand Plan is dead! Long live the friday afternoon project
IT projects are littered with grand plans that have gone horribly none more so than the world’s largest healthcare IT project for the UK health service. Which is now believed will cost in excess of €26Bn a truly staggering sum of money. Worse the UK parliament’s public accounts committee believes that patients are “unlikely” to see any “significant clinical benefits”. While UK based taxpayers will be dismayed at the sheer waste of money, the IT director will empathise with the guy left trying to fix the system once the original contractors are gone.
Most IT directors and CIO’s have at some point been seduced by smooth suited consultants, integrators and software vendors who promise untold business benefits accompanied by categorical assurances that they will deliver. “Of course they can’t be responsible if the organisation isn’t clear about requirements”. The last statement is the curse and downfall of every “IT grand plan” and rest assured it’s billed every step of the way.
Modern business of any kind is not static. Given the time it takes to implement these grand plans (typically months if not years) it is not surprising that the business has moved on by the time the weary IT director finally declares the system ready for use and bemoans the fact “its what people asked for” even if its “not what they wanted”.
The solution is not more comprehensive understanding of your requirements. (Anyone who has conducted serious requirements gathering knows that the hapless accountant or manufacturing manager enters a dream world after the first 15 minutes of “what if” questioning.
I came across the solution to this dilemma quite recently when a customer asked me to outline our offering, but categorically didn’t want a grand plan – he was just reversing one such plan. But as he had a series of areas he was interested in, what he wanted was a “Friday afternoon IT project” that could test the idea and see if it shoud be developed into something more meaningful, with no one getting hurt or serious money being wasted.
The idea is simple and takes a leaf from the most successful IT innovations of recent times. Enlist a small band of enthusiasts on a particularly gnarling problem and go from there. Obvious to many, but unfortunately for vendors and mono technological companies this approach is not as lucrative compared to the impressive “forklift” or the “next generation” cost bump as it is euphemistically referred to. Whatever the language it generally requires complete removal of the previous solution to get the improvement.
Why waste millions with a vendor or solutions provider who is simply locking you in because he has to. Look for a solution that allows you to work with what you have and get to the benefit.
Modern networking and the delivery of network services is oriented around platforms not specific dedicated technologies. Critically they span legacy and next generation access technologies enabling you to have one foot in the past and present simultaneously. They are also typically based on open standards, so there’s no proprietary vendor lock-in. This access agnostic platform oriented approach enables IT projects to start with a “Friday afternoon project” and scale up when the benefits have been demonstrated on a micro scale.
If you’re unconvinced there is only one way to know for sure, try it. Skype, Palmpilot, blackberry’s and even email (for those who remember) succeeded in this way, so it doesn’t have to be different for “serious IT projects”.
If you disagree then join the debate, send us your comments and we’ll post them up.
If you’d like to try a Friday afternoon project of your own, contact us and we’ll tell you what Beta tests we currently have running you could join.
