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10 ways implementation teams destroy IT projects

Fellow Enterprise Irregular, Brian Sommer, is a superb blogger; everything he writes is noteworthy. In his latest missive, Brian's Software Safari blog offers ten common ways that IT implementation project teams contribute to their own failure.
Written by Michael Krigsman, Contributor

Fellow Enterprise Irregular, Brian Sommer, is a superb blogger; everything he writes is noteworthy. In his latest missive, Brian's Software Safari blog offers ten common ways that IT implementation project teams contribute to their own failure. From Brian's post:

  1. No one in our firm can make a decision - the project died from paralysis
  2. Management operates in a decentralized fashion and we were idiots to think this centralized HR (or Finance) system could actually achieve some measure of standardization
  3. We didn't realize that the consultants we hired actually believe this ERP software is their employment for life dream come true
  4. Everyone in our firm is intractable. No one seems able to put aside some of their 'requirements' for the greater good
  5. Oops - we forgot the sheer enormity of modifications we did to the last package - Putting all these changes into the new package blew out the budget
  6. We're terrible at math and still don't know why 28 half-time workers don't work as effectively as 14 full-time team members
  7. Our project sponsor had no political power and the project was canceled the first time an important monetary or policy issue arose
  8. We have some users who sabotaged this implementation because they wanted this to fail and hope we'll go back and buy the package they really wanted
  9. Our firm can't keep anyone in one position for more than a few weeks. We've changed project leaders twice, executive sponsor three times and now our new CEO decided to kill the project.
  10. We're screw-ups -- If we ever succeeded with a big project like this, management would expect us to routinely perform miracles and we're just not going to set up an expectation like that!

Seems like a tongue-in-cheek list, but is it really?

[via fellow Enterprise Irregular Jason Busch]

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