The Importance of Requirements in IT Projects
The stakeholders, consultants and the project managers have given their personal opinion regarding the ultimate reasons which acts as the major cause for the failure of the It projects. In this report the major reasons lying the failure of the IT projects have been discussed. The report is based upon a case study where it has been seen that Dr. Gomez is facing certain problems regarding the keeping of the patient’s records. It has been seen that now the records of the patients are kept in hard copy at the storage facilities. The current record facility is not capable of delivering the records as needed. So there is a need of creating an information facility that would be helping in a lot by facilitating the access of the records and te tracking of the appointments in the old as well as the new location. The most common reason lying behind the failure of the IT projects has also been listed below.
There is an essential need of presence of six requirements in order to make a project successful and this mainly includes the delivering on time, the cost should not be exceeding the budget, working as designed, people who would be using it, the people who are responsible for funding the project and are happy with it and lastly the meeting of the goals which would be driving the project. It has been seen that almost 39% of the projects mainly fails due to lack of requirements. It is almost impossible to complete a project is proper requirements are not present. With absence of the improper requirements the project would not be capable of doing the things which it is supposed to do. Besides this the project won’t be meeting the goals and would also not be capable of making the sponsors happy. Requirements are often responsible for the failure of the projects and this might happen if the sponsors are not associated with documenting the requirements and this might lead the team out of the development process. It is very much essential to document down all the requirements and then present it to the development team. One such example by which the unavailability of the requirement can be understood is the incident which occurred in 2008 in the Qantas Australian National Airline. In 2008 almost $40 million dollar known as the Jetsmart project. Jetsmart was a project which was mainly to be developed for the purposeof managing the parts in the company’s airplane mechanism. However the solution which was proposed for doing this was very much poorly designed and was very much complicated as well. this solution was not at all accepted by the airlines.it was also later stated by the officials of Qantas that instead of asking for the mechanics which was needed for the project they just wanted to build whatever they thought was appropriate. Initially after failing to involve all the right subject matter experts and the end users Qantas has to stop the very costly IT project and this initially led to the company ending up with a three more years of spending time on the solution which was provided as a replacement of the previous solution.
The Role of Stakeholder Involvement in IT Projects
This acts as a big cause which is responsible for the failure of the IT projects. The project sponsors instead of getting themselves involved in the project they are associated with taking their hands off the requirements and besides this they are also associated with waiting for the teams in order to deliver the products which have been completed. For this reason the teams are left with no representative in order to contact whenever any kind of questions arises. Besides this they are also forced to make certain guesses and makes them continue with the process of development. Is case if something wrong happens then the wrong thing is not discovered unless and until a conclusion is reached in e development process. Ultimately this would be leading to various consequences like unhappy project sponsors, and also leads to projects which are not at all fit for any kind of release and this also might lead to certain changes which are complex and this would also be leading to overdue and over budget of the project. According to records almost 27 percent of eth failed projects are due to the presence of the inadequate sponsors. The reason uninvolved sponsors can be better understood by making use of an example that is the thing which happened in one of the U.S government project. The “HealthCare.gov” can be considered as one of the most publicized IT project failure which has occurred in the last decade. The HealthCare.gov is an U.S. Government project which involved the building of a website. This website was planned in order to allow uninsured individuals to purchase the health insurance. This purchasing would be associated with various rate of discounts through the private exchanges. This initiative was launched in the year of 2013 in the month of October. As soon as the initiative was launched various type of issues occurred. One issue was that the site was not capable of supporting more than eight million users who are associated with visiting the website in the first few days of its launch. Due to this reason only 1% of the users were capable of enrolling themselves. When investigations were conducted it was found that the major reasons lying behind the failure of this project was due to lack of communication and also due to the absence of active participation of the stakeholders. According to an article of Times, where Steve Bill wrote that “No one in the White House meetings leading up to the launch had any idea whether the technology worked”. Along with this the Chief Technology Officer of White House was deliberately excluded from the meeting plans related to the project.
Challenges of Accurate Estimations in IT Projects
The earliest phase of the project include the making of estimations regarding the project. The team members who are associated with the project knows very little about the requirements of the project and also the dependencies along with the cost and the time. The estimations which are made at the beginning of the project might be four time more or less than the actual implementations costs and the timeframes. With maturity of the requirements and the beginning of the development the variability also gets less and this becomes zero when a project is completed. They may be variable and the estimates are the necessary evil which occurs in the IT projects and this happens mainly because of the fact that some of the business are willing to hand over a blank check. Besides this before the approval the projects there is an need that the sponsors must decide if they are capable of affording the cost or not and also to see if the investment is worthy or not. But the inaccurate estimates are still not the direct cause of the failure of the project even if they are cited as the cause of the failure and it is almost around 28% of the projects. The inaccurate estimates are mainly occurring due to two major reasons and this includes the following:
- Poor Estimation Practices: In many IT projects it has been seen that the development teams are inexperienced and they are associated with making estimations which they think would be sufficient for running the project in a smooth way. But they underestimates the time and the cost.
- Upfront Planning: The Project managers are associated with requesting an estimation which are too early but despite of this they are not at all bothered to return to the team in order to find out if the estimation is feasible or not.
The problem regarding the inaccurate estimations can be better understand by making use of an incident which occurred in the Denver International Airport Baggage Handling System. In the year of 1990 the city of Denver has been associate with building a new airport for the purpose of accommodating the number of peoples which are increasing in the airport. Automated baggage handling was one thing which was included in the new airport project. This new project was estimated to reduce the flight turnaround by 30 minutes. But there arose many type of complexities while building the new baggage handling system due to the gross underestimation. Instead of decreasing the time this new system delayed the opening of the airport by around 16 months and the cost of the city of Denver was around $1.1 million per day during the delay. Despite of releasing a new version of the baggage system it still did not worked as it was planned to do so. Even after this delay and an extra cost of $560 million which was eventually scrapped in the year of 2005.
Other Factors Contributing to IT Project Failure
There exists several other reasons due to which issues might arise and this might include the “shifting of the objectives of the project”, “other unexpected risks”, “delays on the dependency”, “unavailability of this resources”, “poor project management”, “procrastination of the team member” and many more. The major problems which has been listed above can be eliminated by taking certain steps. One such way is that the representatives of the business should work with the end users in order to document the goals of the project. Besides this the IT representatives should think of the best way to build the project according to the requirements. This two generally occurs concurrently and is very much significant in reducing the risks of project failure which might be a result of the inadequate or incorrect requirements. Besides this it is to be made sure that project sponsors or other business representatives who have been appointed are taking active parts in the development process. The business sponsor should answer the questions of the development team regarding the requirements and the reviews which are under progress. This is to be done in order to make sure that the thing which has been developed is associated with satisfying the original requests. The problem related to the inaccurate estimates can be eliminated by making use of ranged estimates and the re-planning and re-estimation is to be done at a frequent basis. Other ways of eliminating the other problems has been discussed in the following section. An estimation regarding the known and the unknown risks might be helping in avoiding the failure of the project due to the unexpected risks. Before starting of any of the project the resources are allocated and they start to shrink. The changes occurring in the project can be estimated by addressing the objectives of the project, features of the project and lastly the timelines of the project. The problems can also be eliminated by including a process which would be related to handling of the changes in the scope of the project. And by this the changes can be answered in an easy way along with addressing the timeline as well as the budget. In order to deliver something which is within a certain timeframe and budget and are committed with a smaller scope it is necessary to wait for the resources which are needed for the IT project. The projects should also be having someone who would be responsible for leading the progress of the work towards the goal of the project. There should be training schemes for those who would be associated with leading the project towards the success of the project. Besides this a single flexible constraint should be selected which includes the time, budget or the scope. And after this re-planning is to be done frequently so as to make sure that the plans are still of track and also for the purpose of adjusting the plans before it’s too late. Application of the cone of uncertainty in order to make estimation form everyone who are involved in the teams for eth purpose of mitigating the risks related to any kind of unexpected delays and the unknown issues.
Effective Strategies for IT Project Success
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