Tuesday, March 25, 2014
A Managerial Blind Spot
The healthcare.gov web page fiasco calls attention to a
persistent management problem; namely, the frequency with which IT projects
fail.
Anyone wishing to pursue the matter can simply Google up “IT
project failure.” One reference it
produces quotes a study by the McKinsey consulting company reporting that “On
average, large IT projects run 45 percent over budget and 7 percent over time,
while delivering 56 percent less value than predicted.” A survey by KPMG consultants in New Zealand
found that “….70% of organizations have suffered at least one project failure
in the prior 12 months.”
A variety of reasons are given to explain this pattern of
chronic failure. All undoubtedly have
some merit. My own view is that it is
attributable mainly to inadequate management - what I call a managerial blind
spot.
Complex projects (and all IT projects are complex) can be
greatly affected by detail. An analogy
would be that of adding a foot to the width of a bathroom while a house is
under construction. Doing that might
seem like a small thing but because of its potential effects on everything else
it could easily cause a major increase in cost and a delay in completion.
In the case of
healthcare.gov, it is reported that there was a question as to whether anyone
would be allowed to go on the website and see the coverage options available
and the cost of each. Massachusetts had
done that and the federal programmers were following the Massachusetts
example. Late in the planning process,
someone decided that was not a good approach and that people should first have
to learn whether they were eligible for subsidies. Implementing that decision required that a
lot of the programs be rewritten.
The point here is that if IT projects are to be successful,
the end product must be clearly defined in advance and any issues involved it
achieving it must be resolved. Contemporary managers are not particularly
good at that. They like to think of
themselves as “big picture” people who delegate what they see as small stuff to
others. But in complex projects, what
seems to be small stuff, like widening a bathroom, is behind many of the
failures. Also, managers are often reluctant to deal
with the friction associated with resolving differences and so Issues get
kicked down the road. The result is
delay, cost overrun, and a failure to achieve the desired result..
Obama took a lot of heat for the debacle, and appropriately
so. But he doesn’t have to feel
particularly lonesome in his misery.
