Reducing Variance in IT Project Delivery: Small Changes with Big Impacts

What I am about to talk about I see as common sense – but is often missing in the projects I’m asked to assure or recover.

Variance in IT project delivery often leads to budget overruns, missed deadlines, and unmet expectations. For organisations invested in project assurance, reducing this variance is critical to ensuring and assuring that projects meet their goals and comply with agreed-upon constraints.

Here are my thoughts on some small (yet impactful) changes that can streamline project delivery and minimise variance.

1. Standardise Requirements Gathering

The Challenge: The root cause of variance often starts at the requirements stage. Ambiguous or incomplete requirements can result in rework, delays, and scope creep.

The Change: Implement standardised templates and processes for requirements elicitation. Tools like checklists and predefined formats for user stories or technical specifications can help ensure all relevant information is captured consistently.

Impact on Variance: Standardised requirements reduce the risk of misinterpretation and help establish a clear baseline for the project scope.

2. Enhance Risk Management Practices

The Challenge: Many IT projects are plagued by unforeseen, emergent risks that disrupt delivery flow, timelines and budgets.

The Change: Make risk management a continuous process rather than a one-time activity. Introduce mandatory risk workshops at each project milestone and maintain an updated risk register – that is not just shelf ware! Use simple scoring models to prioritise risks and plan mitigations.

Impact on Variance: Regularly assessing and addressing risks ensures fewer surprises, allowing the team to stay on track – it is not the be-all and end-all but is a must-have .

3. Establish Clear Metrics for Success

The Challenge: Without well-defined and measurable success criteria, teams may diverge in their understanding of project goals. A human being should be able to “see” that successful outcome.

The Change: Define key success metrics (e.g., scope adherence, customer satisfaction, or time-to-market) at the outset. Align these metrics with stakeholder expectations and incorporate them into regular progress reviews.

Impact on Variance: Clear, measurable (“Show me?”) success metrics ensure that all efforts are directed toward a common goal, reducing misalignment and rework.

4. Focus on Stakeholder Communication

The Challenge: Misaligned expectations and poor communication between stakeholders and the project team are frequent causes of delivery issues, change and variance.

The Change: Schedule regular check-ins with stakeholders and provide clear, concise updates using visual tools like dashboards. Establish escalation paths and roles to resolve conflicts quickly.

Impact on Variance: Timely communication reduces misunderstandings and allows quicker resolution of potential blockers.

5. Use Data to Drive Decisions

The Challenge: Many decisions in IT projects are made based on intuition rather than data, increasing the likelihood of errors.

The Change: Leverage analytics tools to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) such as burn rate, velocity, and defect density. Use historical data from past projects to predict potential bottlenecks and make informed decisions.

Impact on Variance: Data-driven insights enable proactive management, reducing the risk of deviation from planned outcomes.

6. Strengthen Quality Assurance (QA)

The Challenge: Quality issues discovered late in the project lifecycle can lead to extensive rework and missed deadlines.

The Change: Integrate QA into every stage of the project. Adopt practices like automated testing, peer reviews, and incremental acceptance testing.

Impact on Variance: Continuous quality checks help catch defects early, significantly reducing the time and cost required to fix them later.

7. Empower Teams with Training and Tools

The Challenge: Teams often face inefficiencies due to skill gaps or lack of access to the right tools.

The Change: Invest in upskilling team members on relevant methodologies, tools, and technologies. Ensure all team members have access to standardised toolkits for collaboration, version control, and task management.

Impact on Variance: Equipped teams are better prepared to handle challenges, improving productivity and consistency.

8. Identify and Focus on the Critical Constraint

The Challenge: Many IT projects suffer from inefficiencies because teams are trying to optimise everything at once, often ignoring the most significant bottleneck in the process.

The Theory of Constraints (ToC) Approach: In ToC, the first step is to identify the constraint—the part of the project or process that limits overall progress. This could be anything from a resource bottleneck (e.g., limited expertise in a certain technology) to external factors like vendor delays.

Once identified, the entire team focuses on improving the constraint rather than spreading resources thin across all aspects of the project. By addressing the constraint, the entire flow of the project is improved.

Impact on Variance: By focusing attention on the most critical aspect of the project that’s slowing down delivery (the constraint), teams can resolve issues quicker and reduce variance, ensuring projects stay on track.

9. Conduct Regular Project Assurance Reviews

The Challenge: Without oversight, small issues can snowball into major problems.

The Change: Schedule regular assurance reviews, focusing on compliance with project plans, risk management, and delivery quality. Include independent reviewers to provide an objective assessment.

Impact on Variance: Assurance reviews act as a checkpoint to identify and resolve variances early, keeping the project on track.

10. Utilise Lightweight Governance

The Challenge: Overly bureaucratic governance can slow down decision-making and discourage agility, while too little oversight can lead to chaos.

The Change: Introduce lightweight governance practices, such as quick stand-up meetings for approvals, pre-defined escalation paths, and digital tools for tracking approvals.

Impact on Variance: Lightweight governance strikes a balance between control and flexibility, ensuring timely interventions without hampering team agility.

11. Emphasise Leadership Accountability

The Challenge: A lack of clear leadership roles can lead to poor decision-making and unclear priorities. This is directly linked to stakeholder communication.

The Change: Assign accountability for key project outcomes to specific leaders, such as a project sponsor or delivery manager. Foster a culture where leaders actively engage with teams and provide necessary support.

Impact on Variance: Strong leadership ensures decisive actions and prevents small issues from escalating into major variances.

12. Adopt Lessons Learned as a Practice

The Challenge: Many teams fail to leverage insights from past projects, repeating mistakes that could have been avoided.

The Change: Conduct structured lessons-learned sessions throughout the project at key milestones/events and at project closure and maintain a centralised repository of best practices, pitfalls, and recommendations for future projects.

Impact on Variance: Continuous improvement through organisational learning ensures better preparedness for similar challenges in subsequent projects.

Conclusion

From my experience, by making these small but significant changes, organisations can reduce variance in project delivery while reinforcing their project assurance frameworks. Incorporating these practices into your project delivery and assurance framework can also help create a culture of continuous improvement, where variance is not just managed but actively minimised.

For project assurance activities, these changes emphasise proactive identification and mitigation of potential deviations.

Each change emphasises proactive planning, continuous monitoring, and early intervention, ensuring projects stay within scope, time, and budget. Collectively, these adjustments not only improve project outcomes but also enhance the organisation's reputation for delivering quality IT solutions.

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Have a great week!