Aptus Consultants

Lots of IT projects fail, for lots of different reasons, but one of the most common reasons is that projects start wrong.

Do you know how to start a project on the right foot?

Look before you leap

It sounds obvious, but it needs to be stated: you have to make sure that you know what you want to achieve. Do you know why you need this project?

Too many businesses forget to define in detail and quantitatively what they want the project to achieve.

Too often they dive straight into the details of what it will do.

Why is more important than What

Without a clear, unambiguous and quantitative definition of business objectives, everyone involved in the project will start off with differing ideas of what it is supposed to achieve. Or worse, they don't have an articulate view at all, just a vague hunch defended forcefully. Not surprisingly, this tends to create conflict later on in the project, pulling project teams and sponsors in different directions.

In particular, project teams and sponsors often disagree on details of features because they have different views of what the project should achieve.

Effort gets expended on features that are irrelevant or a distraction because no-one can explain why they are irrelevant. Key features are over-looked or bungled, because no-one realised they mattered.

If the project does eventually complete, it can be hard to tell if it succeeded or not, because no-one agreed what success would look like in the first place.

Sadly, this happens more often than not. Surprisingly, this happens a lot for big budget projects. You'd have thought that with all that investment at stake people would pay more attention to why they were buying, instead of concentrating so much effort on what they were buying.

Work on the numbers

Everyone involved in the project needs to agree the objectives. The project sponsor, on behalf of the business (and ideally in partnership with the project team) should define measurable targets that define the project success. This is the why of the project.

These targets can take lots of forms. For example, do you want to increase brand awareness? If so, by how much? How will you measure it? Over what time scale? How do you define your audience? If you are aiming for a particular % increase as your ideal, what value would you settle for at worst case?

How much is this worth to you, and over what period? This helps you decide the project budget.

Or perhaps you want to generate more sales through increasing website visitor numbers and improving conversions. You need to define targets for the increase in visitors and the conversion rates, along with the time scale for achieving them.

Remember to distinguish between your ideal targets and the minimum targets below which the project is considered a failure.

Once everyone has agreed why do the project it is much easier to agree what the project should do.

The business objectives should naturally lead to detailed, quantitative project objectives, and these should in turn equate to specific project features.

As well as ensuring that everyone is working to common goals, clarity of business and project objectives makes prioritisation easier and helps weed out irrelevant features. It also helps highlight the facilities that are critical to the success of the project.

If a feature does not help achieve a project objective, it is irrelevant so don't waste resources on it. If a project objective cannot be delivered without a particular feature, then that feature is critical, so commit the right resources to it.

So before you embark on an IT project, make sure you know why before you consider what.