I read an article in CIO Magazine about the plight of today’s CIOs when multi-million dollar multi-year projects go awry. The article entitled “The CIO Scapegoat” indicates that it is unfair to hold the IT department completely responsible when there are so many other business units that contribute to a project’s demise. In many cases, the CIO takes the fall for the failure and, as a direct result, they are either demoted, moved into a different organization or let go altogether.
The article goes on to provide advice to CIOs who are beginning such undertakings. First and foremost, large, complex projects should be broken up into “bite-sized” chunks and proper expectations of what will be delivered in each “mini-project” should be set – and agreed upon – with the various stakeholders.
I could not agree more with this statement and find it most concerning that this is not more of a common practice within the IT industry. In our World of rapid prototyping (turned production) and just-in-time development, to think that you could perform a multi-year project without implementing several checkpoints along the way is simply insane. This may be one of the reasons why the average life-span of a CIO is only two years within the same company.
CIOs who agree to perform projects under such conditions really need to read my previous blog entitled “Lessons Learned from Enterprise Identity Management Projects“. While it was written mainly for enterprise identity projects it has direct applicability to any enterprise project. In that article I directly address specific points about expectation setting and bite-sized chunks (did CIO Magazine read my blog on this?) and by taking my advice to heart, the average CIO might be able to extend their stay.
