Investing in new technology has always been a risky business, but that hasn’t stopped many organizations from forging ahead with grand plans. The reason is the payoff for such systems is enticing. For years, technology investing, and therefore business case development, has shown anywhere from a 3-5 year ROI. That just happens to match the depreciation schedule of such investments but I won’t bore you with accounting details here.
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But the rules of the game have changed, and changed dramatically. Technology refresh cycles are becoming shorter and shorter, and are now approaching 2 years. This means that any legitimate business case supporting such investments needs to span no more than 2 years as well. The ramifications for this are quite dramatic from a project management perspective. As the average useful life of most information systems introduced to the market is compressing, the implementation schedules of these projects must also be compressed to meet the business case ROI. So how do we do it?
One way to compress an IT project’s time frame is to “optimize” it’s execution through shorter release schedules and a faster cadence of releases. If you’re working on a software development project, here’s where Agile practices will be helpful. If the project is more of a systems solution (combination of hardware and software) certain Agile practices can certainly be applied as well but we need to think of different ways of completing the project.
Another method is to not “boil the ocean” with a grand design but rather implement in pieces, phases or waves. Business users typically want everything at once so it will take some collaboration, and perhaps a bit of arm twisting, to get them to agree to a phased approach. However, the CFO can be a great ally in this effort by demanding to see business cases that now align with technology cycles and to also see that the project schedules will produce the expected ROI.
A successful PM in IT these days is going to have think harder and harder about ways to compress schedules yet deliver outstanding results. Challenging times ahead to be sure.
