*Discover Success: How Proactive CEOs Mitigate 24+ Pitfalls to Avoid "IT" Related Lawsuits

Why Mission-Critical IT Programs Fail

Enthusiasm and excitement at the beginning of a new initiative tends to mask the inherent complexity of medium to large mission-critical IT programs. As a result, complex mission-critical IT programs often start with an over-abundance of optimism.

As a consequence, root-causes of failure, risks, and process concerns are often under-scrutinized and overlooked or even brushed aside with personal guarantees and assurances from the IT team that all will be well. Then, as early milestones are missed, the IT program begins to run behind schedule and over-budget as a result of these same overlooked concerns, root-causes, and risks.

To get the mission-critical IT program back on-time and on-budget, the IT program team now begin anew to overlook even newly-emerging concerns and risks as they begin to address the symptoms of the original risks. This vicious cycle of addressing symptoms of the original issues and risks while ignoring root-causes continues ad infinitum.

This never-ending cycle then causes the IT program team to work overtime or reduce features to bring the program back on-track and on-budget. This approach seemed to mostly work on their smaller projects in the past. However, these same late night and weekend "heroics" and reduced feature set will not work as expected on a medium to large mission-critical IT program; but on the contrary, will instead increase the time and cost rather than bringing the project back to plan as hoped for.

To proactively avoid repeating mistakes like those described in the scenario above, most IT teams will perform a post-mortem or lessons learned analysis of the root-causes. Unfortunately, the IT team typically lacks the experience, incentives, nor time necessary to discover the actual root-causes of failure nor do they have the authority to remediate root-causes.

To make matters worse, the program leaders usually prioritize celebrating things that went well in the name of positivity or optimism over learning the lessons of the failure, which they prefer to avoid and minimize to help maintain morale. In contrast, Bill Gates recognized the importance of prioritizing lessons learned over celebrating success when he said, "It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure."

Learning from previous failures is extremely important, because mission-critical IT programs that run overdue and over-budget for too long are frequently canceled or never adopted. As a result, the CEO may now face a litany of consequences such as damage to their reputation, potential litigation, escalating customer complaints, and even a lack of trust with the board to mention only but a few.

It is therefore important to prioritize learning how to "celebrate lessons-learned" over "celebrating success".

How Failing IT Programs Impact Customer Satisfaction

Failing IT programs can negatively affect every side of a business' ability to innovate and operate which then impedes the delivery of value to its customers, employees, and leadership team.

Listed below are just a few examples of how failing mission-critical IT Program impacts overall customer satisfaction:

• Customers doubt brand integrity from an ongoing lawsuit

• Customer referrals or net promoter score metrics are lower

• Customers complain about errors, missing features and functions

• Customers and employees complain about performance or reliability

• Customers low adoption of new offerings impedes sales and growth

• Customer retention and repeat business continue to decline

What Is The IT Industry's Best-Kept Secret?

The 72% failure rate and its solution (see CAPstone Strategy™ below). It's no secret that overdue and over-budget programs often lead to negative customer and employee experiences. In addition, budget overruns negatively impact both strategy execution and loss of capital investments. However, this high industry failure rate and its solution is the IT industry's best-kept secret! Why? Because it's human nature to hide and avoid our failures, rather than facing root-causes to help identify solutions.

Why Good Leadership Alone Is Not Enough

It's easy to conclude that overdue and over-budget programs are exclusively a leadership issue, but be forewarned that nothing could not be further from the truth!

Extensive industry research by JSMC on root-causes show that a change in leadership (or IT experts) is very often insufficient to bring a failing IT program back on-track and on-budget. Why is this? Because complex mission-critical IT programs are often plagued by 24+ root-cause pitfalls that very few leaders and experts are aware of. Even very experienced leaders can inevitably fall into a few of the 24+ pitfalls they may yet be unfamiliar with that contribute to the failure of mission-critical IT programs (medium to large projects).

For example: One of many root-causes is cognitive "optimism bias" for the IT program, as the proforma business value is often presented without sufficient identification of the risks (24+ root causes) that may substantially impact ROI.

Why You Can't Delegate Success

Culture eats strategy for breakfast. Despite what many experts believe, independent industry research by both McKinsey and JSMC has shown that failing IT programs can only be consistently mitigated with the CEO's support in addressing the root-causes of failure inherent within the fabric of company culture.

This is contrary to popular practice of CEOs delegating this activity to a manager or the IT program team. This same research reveals that the #1 success factor for successful completion of mission-critical IT programs is the CEO's direct involvement!

As such, the CEO is the only one with the authority and leadership skills to mitigate IT program failure by proactively taking ownership of and address the root-causes contributing to failure. And if the CEO is unfamiliar with root-causes, then an expert guide or Master Architect must be engaged until awareness and proficiency are reached.

What Would a Good Solution Look Like?

A good solution starts by first addressing the root-causes of failure. Furthermore, a good solution requires copious amounts of risk management to mitigate root-causes of failure. Finally, a good solution must be capable of right-sizing the program development process to fit the specific needs of the project.

As such, a good solution and a good team that are highly experienced in root-cause awareness, root-cause antidotes, and a track record of success is an absolute necessity. Even so, extensive industry research demonstrates that if all the above are in place, without a good sponsor, mission-critical IT programs still remain at a high-risk of failure unless the CEO is highly engaged with the team as a servant leader.

Surprisingly, even if you have a good solution, good team, and good sponsor (CEO), failure is still likely unless all of the above have demonstrated high-levels of proficiency on previous programs of a similar nature and size.

For example: A good solution, good team, and good sponsor with a track record of success on programs with a budget of $1M or less would find success elusive on larger programs of $5M or more.

What Solutions Are Available for Mission-Critical IT Programs?

Based on the industry metric of 72% failure, you may have already guessed that few solutions are available. This is not far from the truth, given that most solutions were never created for the purpose of successfully executing mission-critical IT programs (programs that are strategic and medium to large in size).

Instead, most solutions, such as Waterfall and Agile, were created to optimize the program development process while neglecting both the root-causes of failure and risk management. For example, if using a Waterfall approach, the process is to proceed through a linear sequence of design and implementation gates with a big-bang delivery at the end whereas an Agile approach proceeds through a linear sequence of time-boxed increments or sprints with incremental deliveries but with little to no design. Unfortunately, the success rate for both of these approaches remains at a mere 28% over the last 30-years for mission-critical IT programs for reasons given above.

The CAPstone Strategy™ Solution

However, there is at least one solution available called CAPstone Strategy that boasts a success rate of 90%+ in contrast to the dismal success rate of only 28% for all other solutions. This is an improvement greater than 221% to the overall success rate! CAPstone Strategy therefore allows you predict failure proactively when a mission-critical IT program must be done right the first-time. In circumstances like this, Gene Kranz said it best when he stated: "Failure is not an option." Unlike other solutions, CAPstone Strategy is the only game in town purpose-built to address the root-causes of failure, to proactively manage risks, and to right-size the process for any given mission-critical IT program.

Does this mean that other solutions such as Waterfall and Agile are entirely wrong or to be avoided? It depends. It turns out that both Waterfall and Agile are sometimes able to achieve satisfactory results in rare circumstances where the root-causes of failure are not actively in-play, the risk is low, and the development process happens to be of little consequence.

It should be noted that it takes a highly experienced Master Architect to evaluate these three criteria (root-causes, risks, process) to then choose an appropriate solution based on the specific needs of your program.

Key Factors, Tradeoffs, and Assessment

The key factors and tradeoffs then to consider when selecting your solution to execute a mission-critical IT program has to do with specific root-causes related to program sponsorship, overall program complexity and size, and what process may be needed to achieve success. All of these factors are very difficult to accurately assess without the long-term experience of a Master Architect and is just one of many contributing factors to the dismal 72%+ failure rate.

If you have a new or existing mission-critical IT program that must be done right the first-time, on-time, and on-budget, but your team is missing milestones, overdue, going over-budget, showing little progress, perhaps has no budget, or has "gone dark" with little to no transparency — these may be early predictors of impending IT program failure. As you may have heard "where there is smoke, there is likely to be fire."

If you find yourself in this situation, it is recommended that you consult a Master Architect (enterprise solution architect) to help complete a CAPstone Strategy assessment capable of uncovering which root-causes of failure may be in-play on your program to help rescue a program already in-flight or even to predict or proactively mitigate the risk of failure on a new program.

To get started, JSMC offers a free consult with an expert guide or Master Architect to verify whether or not an assessment would be beneficial to your mission-critical IT program.

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