By Gemma Simpson, 28 June 2007 13:07
NEWS
Could UK CIOs learn a thing or two about managing IT projects from their American brethren?
When an IT project is late and corporate profits are threatened, most UK managers (63 per cent) said they would reduce the project's scope. The next most common responses were to increase the budget (45 per cent) or reduce quality and performance testing (31 per cent), research from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and HP reveals.
Across the pond in the Americas however, the most common response was to increase automation of manual IT processes - 41 per cent of North and South American IT leaders chose this option compared to less than one-fifth of UK respondents.
About 40 per cent of American CIOs would reduce the project scope and 38 per cent would increase the budget, the survey of of 1,125 IT chiefs reveals.
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Dave Clarke, HP software pre-sales manager, said the differences between the UK and the Americas could be cultural with the New World having more of a "hire and fire" work ethic.
Clarke added the American IT chiefs may set out a project's requirements better than their UK counterparts - or simply not admit when they scale down a failing IT project.
But lateness appears to be a problem around the globe. More than one-third of all respondents admitted 25 per cent or more of their IT projects were late.
Clarke said: "The consequence from the industry is the demands on the IT department have outstripped their ability to deliver."
Comments
There are 3 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
Expecting CIO's to admit to their own failures is like expecting turkeys to vote for Christmas!
In my experience, responses must always be tempered by the person answering the questions. Not surprisingly, when I have interviewed CIOs and IT managers about their implementations, they are nearly always to a man very successful and meet their objectives!
2. Phil Stubbington
American CIOs show how it's done - BADLY.
If you look at the hard and independent evidence (e.g. the Chaos Report from Standish) then reducing scope is a far more effective response than "automating processes".
Of course the root of the problem is down to things like poorly defined requirements and lousy estimating - neither of which have much at all to do with automation!
3. Garry E Hunt
It is an assumption that American CIOs are better than their counterparts in the UK and elsewhere when concerned with projects involving information technology (IT).
The mistake is the constant reference to IT projects. They do not exist. We have business projects which are enabled by IT.
The projects are the responsibility of the businesses, as it is their bottom line which is affected by the success or failure.
The issue then is not about CIOs but about the ability of business managers to take responsibility for their projects and to then make the appropriate use of the IT activities and capabilities of the CIO and their team. Removing the financial responsibilities from the IT function and making the businesses take control is the critical step which is the way successful companies operate. Alas, too many senior managers and Board members have abdicated from their responsibility and used the CIO function as a scape goat for any failures.
The American CIOs are, in general, no better than other CIOs around the world. However, companies, their business managers and Board members can learn a lot from companies who do produce success IT enabled business projects regularly.
Perhaps then we can make progress from these decades punctuated by statements of alleged IT failures, when really it is the business functions which have been at fault