“Most IT Projects are useless and deliver no value” – Bold Statement of The Week
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During a university lecture today, the lecturer shared a provocative statement, saying that most IT projects are ineffective at delivering value and does not contribute anything useful. Even when a technically sound deliverable has been made, the deliverable provides no value to the business. I would like to argue otherwise. But I’ll get to that.
Of course, I consider this as one of those classroom statements designed to get us students to brainstorm about reasoning behind this statement. Which was precisely why were split up into groups of four for 15 minutes, so that we can share our thoughts and opinions.
I really enjoyed hearing everybody’s perspective on this statement. It’s fascinating to hear from others how such a statement is translated into real world experiences that others have had and how these experiences can drive someone to believe in such a statement.
Some students in my group argued that they don’t agree completely because there are IT project’s that were successful that they were a part of. Projects that weren’t successful usually did not define the value they wished to gain from the beginning of the project, as some projects are started with the latest and greatest trendy tech and “hope for the best” that something disruptive comes out of it.
Here’s why I personally don’t fully agree with the initial statement. There are, indeed, enough multi-million dollar IT projects that were complete failures both in the public and the private sector. In the Netherlands for example, some IT projects that aimed to improve some large parts of the Dutch citizen administration systems proved to be an utter waste of time and public money. On the flip side, I believe that IT projects that are more private, customer-oriented, less exploratory in nature and more focused to specific needs of the client do tend to be successful. Reason being that requirements and other wants and needs are better determined due to private money being put into the equation and again, more focused goals. Obviously even these kinds of projects can fail. But I argue that some types of projects can and tend to be more successful, due to the kind of deliverable that was intended to deliver.
Some of they key takeaways of this lecture, and, the opinions and thoughts of other students, for me was: “IT shouldn’t be the driving force behind projects but must be an enabler.” “IT shouldn’t exist nor has the right to dictate which direction a project should take.” and lastly “We need to have a cultural change on how we look at project management in regards to IT”.
These last few statements were for me good food for thought as I do agree with these statements but still had some internal questions. I also believe that we should see IT as tools to reach our human-driven goals and not necessarily as a holy front desk for all of our problems. IT should be a ship. A good one, preferably. But not the captain of the ship. That’s for us, humans to assume.