Project Management Insanity


It has been said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Yet despite a long history of failure, most IT projects continue to be managed with text documents, spreadsheets, emails and point solutions. When the Standish Group released its first Chaos Report in 1994, only 16 percent of projects were successful. Fifteen years and many tools later, still less than a third of all projects are considered successes. In baseball, such a success rate may get you into the Hall of Fame, but in business it will just get you fired.


Efforts to achieve project success through improved tool features have netted limited results because they have focused on fixing symptoms rather than curing the disease of unsynchronized teams. Often the problem is diagnosed as a particular issue, such as the management of requirements, defects, tests, change requests, etc. Vendors have responded by making specialized tools designed to address each aspect of the project. These tools may be an improvement over text documents and spreadsheets, but they also provide a false sense of security by suppressing a symptom while simultaneously building silos of data that reinforce barriers between team members.


Choosing disconnected tools for every aspect of the project is like hiring a manager that only speaks French, a business analyst that only speaks Russian, a developer that only speaks Japanese, and a quality assurance person that only speaks Greek. Even if every person is the very best available in their respective field, wouldn't you still be better off building a team that all speaks the same language? However, the status quo in IT projects is, figuratively speaking, to allow each team member to speak his or her own language. Consequently, important information is often lost in translation resulting in mistakes.


Just about every IT professional has faced first-hand the difficulty of working in disconnected teams. Managers and their teams spend large amounts of time correlating data in spreadsheets, building patchwork integrations, manually building traceability matrices and holding daily meetings in an attempt to keep everyone on the same page. Inevitably, information is outdated, version control issues arise, people aren't made aware of key decisions, mistakes are made and valuable time is wasted. Even a team of all-stars will struggle when they don't understand how each other's tasks affect one another.


The Chaos Report demonstrates that individuals may be better equipped to perform their assigned tasks, but they are not much better prepared to work together as a team to achieve their goal. The time has come to appreciate the barriers to success created by disconnected teams and data, and consider the value of connecting data in a single source of project truth. To continue working with disconnected tools and expecting different results would just be insane.


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