5 Steps To Avoid IT Project Failures

But without this kind of wholesale cultural transformation, your only other option is the commoditization of your core value proposition and, eventually, complete irrelevance. The best examples are the giant consumer banks of today. In a few years, the only ones that will be worth their size will be the ones that figured out how to leverage their big data -- an impossible pivot absent a pervasive data-driven culture.

Oh, and before you run off to create a C-level role focused on culture or data (a very "senior management" thing to do), realize that cultural transformations must start from the bottom and travel up.

3. Don't pay rock stars. Pay roadies. (I left those last two words unbolded to scare the habitual skimmers.)

Paying your stars generously for great leadership misses the point on the power of followership. If you haven't watched Derek Sivers' TED talk on "how to start a movement," take a quick break and enjoy the shirtless dancing. The key takeaway is that followership is an underappreciated form of leadership. And in my experience, wildly underpaid.

But it doesn't have to be. Rewarding followership should be the first step in bringing long-term accountability back to IT. The second step should be to tie performance incentives to specific project delivery. So when the career climbers climb before a project is completed, they're choosing to lose their financial stake in the rewards of patience and execution.

The third and most difficult step is tying that final financial reward to quantifiable end-user benefit. And I mean quantifiable after the delivery, not the self-serving marketing schlock that passes for ROI while the project is being sold.

The social, cultural and financial impact of IT investments rarely can be gauged immediately after project delivery. Did the new application/infrastructure save money? Or (more likely) did it fail to retire the thing before it, adding an intentionally overlooked legacy support cost?

The side benefit to this three-step approach is that you begin to eliminate IT's throw-it-over-the-wall culture. Because if I have to wait a year before my deliverable is judge-able -- at which point I get paid -- then I'll do everything I can to make it successful once it's released into the wild.

4. Plant engineers everywhere. If you put 20 poets into a conference room and ask them to solve world hunger, I guarantee that their collective output will be a poem. Or 20 poems. Put 20 project managers into a room and you'll get a 50-page multi-generational plan. Twenty executives? A one-pager that commits to putting 20 project managers into a room.

When the modern HR executive speaks about the need for more diversity, my mind conjures a picture of an engineer. Not because she's a she or a person of color, but because of the diversity of thought and experience that she brings with her.

Plop an engineer into that meeting with the 20 project managers and the output of the team changes -- for the better. I don't know a single engineer who has the patience to put up with process heaviness or indecisiveness-framed-as-thoughtfulness. And not a one would think that you can't engineer your way into a shorter, more efficient meeting.

Youthful enthusiasm at any age! That's part of what engineers got when God took away any ability to dance.

Dress up an engineer and stick him in the room with the executives and you get an Intel or a Microsoft in their early days. You get Silicon Valley, or at least the parts of it that haven't succumbed to the marketers and venture capitalists.

Engineers are seeds you must plant in every sub-optimal function and group in your organization. They are your change agents, your radicals, your first/best front line in transforming IT.

I don't care to find "the right balance" between engineers and non-engineers. The pendulum in both business and IT has swung so far in the opposite direction that I cherish my extremist position: All the Six Sigma dum-dums and non-technical project managers need to be offshored.

5. Fire your vendors. OK, that's a bit extreme. At least challenge them to change their business models so that your org is left smarter because of their engagement.

Rewrite every contract in your shop to recast vendor success as a demonstrable building of internal competencies.

Structure software purchases to trigger payment only after the vendor's product has been successfully integrated with your legacy systems and adopted by your user base. And pay a healthy premium to those vendors that can deliver on your terms.

Speak The Unspoken

The reason certain truths remain unspoken in this line of work is that we feel powerless to change them. The problems are bigger than us. They make for poor office banter and even poorer PowerPoint presentations. And they certainly can't be solved in opinion pieces.

The size and complexity of the unspoken problems in IT require us to have the kind of passion that many times seems inappropriate in the context of work life. The kind of passion that makes you write articles anonymously.

It would do us all good to speak about the unspoken. And hopefully weave in a healthy discussion about our core values. Not enough C-level types use words such as humility, courage, persistence and patience.

It takes real strength. And it empowers all of us to take the harder, better path.