Too Many IT Projects Fail…Here’s How to Make Yours Succeed

It’s always good when a business looks to improve itself by adding new technology. This process can be immensely fruitful, but it can also go the other way and become costly time-sinks. Let’s take a look at what makes new IT projects such a volatile action, and how we can help you improve your chances of successful implementation. 

What Percentage of IT Projects Fail?

Failure, in the terms of IT projects, is a subjective notion. For our purposes, we are going to define failure as an IT project that doesn’t meet its stated objectives.

Typically when an IT project fails it’s because one of the underlying processes had a critical fault. Each project has a planning stage, a production stage, and a testing stage. Throughout this whole process, a lot can go wrong. In fact, 50 percent of projects fall on their head. That’s right, half of all IT projects will fail in some way. Whether the project goes over budget, the timeline is interrupted somehow, or it turns out that the planning stages of the project weren’t completed properly, about half of IT projects fail. 

No matter how you view it, it’s a substantial amount of projects that leave a business in a lurch. It’s a lot of wasted time, effort, and capital. It can have a long term effect on your business’ ability to operate efficiently. 

What You Can Do

Let’s take a look at a couple of things you can do to improve project success:

You’ll Want to be SMART - The SMART acronym has helped project managers deploy technology well. It stands for specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. If you can confidently manage these variables of your new project, your projects will find much more success. 

Lean on…well, Technology -  Funny enough, some of the better tools to help projects find successful conclusions are technological ones. Project management tools, collaboration tools, and other top-down management tools can keep teams on track and get your projects implemented correctly the first time.

Planning is Important - Once you are done planning out your project, do yourself a favor and don’t change it. Sure, if the project needs to be altered somehow to work around unforeseen variables, that has to happen, but reevaluating and changing your core strategies can just lead to inefficiency and cost problems. 

Project Management Help

At JensenIT, we can help your business get the tools needed to manage your own projects or we can run point on technology projects to ensure that you have the best chances of successfully implementing your new tech. Give us a call today to find out more.