How to avoid or deal with delays in IT projects?

Yesterday a colleague asked me for advise on how to treat with project delays. The reason that he asked me was, that he remembered that two years ago I was in trouble with a big project which ended badly.

Obviously, that project failed, but he acknowledged that a lot of corrective actions were done to handle the situation, even that history finished bad for all parties.

The aim of this article is to give some hints and references to understand the characteristic of IT Project Success or Failure and about what can be done to avoid, mitigate or eliminate situation which might provoke delays or failure.

Reality about IT Projects

Reality is that many IT projects do have problems and the yearlong reference on this topic is Chaos Report from Standish Group analyzing project success and associated success factors. Their statistics until 2015 confirms the tendency that 20% of projects are considered failed and 50% of projects run thru difficulties:

For an IT Project Manager this means, that inherently 70% of all projects will run into trouble and his primary task is to assure that the project won't be a failure. A big part of an IT Project Manager's effort is to handle inherent risks which could turn an IT project into a failure.

Trouble factors

Believing ProofHub the reasons why IT projects fail are:

No doubt that most of you have seen some or all of those trouble factors in different shapes and flavors. The question is how to anticipate and how to react to reduce the potential damage.

Project Management Triangle

A common task of an IT Project Manager during a project's lifecycle is the periodic evaluation of the risks (above called Trouble Factors). The objective is to anticipate potential problems and to identify corrective actions to eliminate or mitigate the most relevant risks.

An important part of the evaluation is to determine the impact of the risk in the project. Many people use the Project Management Triangle to classify the risks into impact categories:

The triangle (or the pyramid if you consider Quality as a dimension on its own) represents very well the fact that all dimensions are interconnected which has benefits and caveats.

Standard receipts and its limitations

For this reason the conceptual receipts to treat projects delays are:

• Agree a new schedule with the customer.
• Allow deviation of costs to add additional resources to maintain the timeline
• Reduce scope to commit on things which can be done within the fix timeline
• Reduce quality to get faster to result to meet the timeline

Looks easy, but it's not:

• A new schedule might not be feasible for the customer as he might have legal constraints to meet the agreed timeline.
• No possibility to gather additional budgets
• No additional resources are available in the market
• Scope was already reduced and reducing it further might put in risk the business case
• Lowering the quality threshold will report problems in the long run and affect Total-cost-of-Ownership and customer satisfaction

Business Case

At the end, take corrective actions is not a trivial task. But, there's one argument to have in account: Business Case (with Business Case I refer to the reasoning why a customer decided to do an investment into the project and the plan to return this investment).

Meanwhile the Business Case is valid, it's worth for the customer to get further with the project. For this reason, the principal measurement for IT Project Manager treating with Project Delays or other risks is to assess that the Business Case is still healthy.

Strategy and tactics

Once the business case is confirmed, the IT Project Manager does have a lever to agree with the customer on how to deal with the risks and critical situations. There are different strategies and tactics on behalf of every IT Project Managers:

• Be realistic about deadlines and anticipate situations which might derive into delays,
• Take initial delays seriously and catch them early to do corrective actions if necessary,
• Usage of the right software tools right. Having Jira is one thing, using it well is a different thing,
• Understand the positives associated with delays and relate it with the business case and discuss it openly with your team and the customer,
• Get all parties on board to get a common understanding and commitment,
• Consider all your options and set new priorities together with the team, your customer and your bosses,
• Get everyone on the same page and gather additional resources if possible and reasonable,
• Project delays don't have to derail your project. Remember that "only" 20% of the projects fail and if the business case is positive, your customer will stick with the project.
• Adopt agile practices. There is certain evidence that agile-style projects are more robust against project delay risks. The reason is that well-done agile promotes anticipation and short feedback cycles which addresses some points mentioned in this list.

Overview

We learned that it's likely that IT Projects run into trouble and there's a lot of knowledge on how to deal with it. There are no Silver Bullets to avoid those risks or to get rid of them. But, with a solid business case, there's a big chance to recover and conclude successfully.