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Managing technology projects
By Gillian Kerr, Ph.D., C.Psych.

Last week (March 30 to April 1, 2001) a group of agencies across Ontario got together to discuss how they could make new technology programs sustainable. They were supported by HRDC’s Office of Learning Technologies, who participated in the discussions on how to increase the success rate of these projects, and how to turn a successful project into an ongoing program.

One of the issues that came up repeatedly was the importance of demonstrating the value of technology projects to the future funders, whether they be consumers, corporations, government or the members of your own Board of Directors. In fact, this is a basic tenet of project management — involve the users at the beginning. For most human services, users include not only community members, but the groups who have control over the allocation of resources. And as project management research has repeatedly shown, if you don’t involve users at the beginning, your project will probably fail.

On the basis of the discussions at the Survival to Sustainability conference, as well as years of experience (and many failures — see #8, below), I offer the following tips on increasing the chances that your technology projects will succeed.

Involve users and potential funders at the beginning, and base your project on what’s important to them.

This point is the single most important tip for project success. If you want a project that will continue its benefits after the initial funding has run out, you must be able to demonstrate why it’s important to the people who will sustain it. This is just as vital for internal technology projects in your own agency. I’ve seen many web sites and intranets that were launched after months of hard work, and immediately abandoned by the agency because it just wasn’t important to senior management or the Board. What is important to the future funders? Make sure that your objectives and goals are aligned to the objectives of the people who will decide whether it gets continued. This can be called marketing — it’s also called user requirement definition, and it’s also called an evaluation framework.

The Office of Learning Technologies commissioned an evaluation tool from Good Enough Information Systems to help stakeholders (including funders) negotiate objectives and measures for OLT projects. It’s intended to allow stakeholders to define the minimum expectations for their key objectives as well as the hoped-for results that they tell the funders and their Boards. You may want to adapt it for your own projects.

Nothing is free.

Go ahead and make technology decisions based on price, but make sure that you are including the real costs. If you refuse to use email because it’s too expensive, be aware of the additional costs you’re passing on to your staff (who pick it up at home) or colleagues, who have to accommodate for your refusal to use that channel of communication. If you sign on for a free web service, don’t forget the investments in training and technical support that will be required before your staff can use it effectively. If you hire a cheap programmer, make sure that you won’t be stuck with a lousy product that you can’t support when your programmer leaves. Generally, though, the biggest single mistake that organizations make in technology decisions is forgetting training and technical support costs.

Whatever you do will be wrong.

There’s a story - it might even be true - about a woman who approached Sigmund Freud after a lecture. "Dr. Freud," she said, "How can I be a good mother to my children?" Freud responded, "Don’t worry, madam. Whatever you do will be wrong." That’s how we feel about information technology. Don’t worry — whatever you do will be wrong. Just manage the risks and ensure that your mistakes won’t do too much damage, including the mistake of not doing anything. But relax; you will never make a perfect choice. Be gentle with yourself and with the poor staffer who makes the technology recommendations in your agency.

MS Project does not make you a project manager.

Many people seem to believe that you just have to install Microsoft Project, and you will instantly become a project manager. This is not true. In fact, while MS Project is an amazingly powerful software program, it’s way too complex and expensive for most agencies. (Remember to factor in the cost of training and technical support even if you get terrific charity pricing.)

Text documents and spreadsheets will give you most of what you need for tracking and management tools. Good Enough Information Systems has developed some minimal project management tools for agencies as part of our work with The Canadian Hearing Society and the Survival to Sustainability conference. They comprise a basic project plan, and a sample task list , as well as the evaluation tool described above.

Use small teams and 3 month increments, using each stage as preparation for the next launch.

Successful web companies are moving away from long projects lasting a year or more. There are too many rapid changes, and it’s too hard to control scope for that length of time. Instead, they break up jobs into segments of three or four months. Each segment has its own budget and objectives, and acts as the platform for the next segment. That way, project teams and clients can make changes and control costs as the work progresses, while still having a firm set of objectives for each segment. This approach also helps to manage expectations for stakeholders. Organizations can set priorities for phase 1, 2 and so on without trying to do everything at once. And if your project team is incompetent, you can switch to another provider with minimal disruption and legal hassles.

Value the project team

Good technology teams are hard to find and retain. That applies to internal staff assigned to a technology project as well as the external consultants and programmers that you probably will be working with. Even when you run into inevitable frustrations and difficulties, remember to value and appreciate your team. Unless you’ve done this work before, you can’t understand how hard it is.

Without appropriate support and compassionate monitoring, you’re going to get a demoralized team that either quits (in the case of employees) or refuses to take further jobs with you (in the case of external consultants). In our own company, we can’t afford to work with clients who make our consultants unhappy, because good people are so hard to keep. It makes more sense to ‘fire our clients’ if they make our teams miserable. On the other hand, a good client is a joy to work with, and will get better prices as well as better service.

The best is enemy of the good (or GEPO)

These are words to live by, and I hear them all the time from experienced project managers. If you insist on the best, you either won’t get anything at all (being paralyzed with indecision and argument), or you will pay through the nose for functionality you don’t really need. GEPO is an acronym I heard at the Sustainability conference — it means, "Good enough, push on". You must keep going back to the reasons for embarking on a project, and keep reminding your team of the core user requirements. Once you can deliver those, push on to the next challenge. Don’t try for perfection, but do strive for good enough.

Allow for failure

Finally, allow time for repeated failures. Successful organizations learn from their mistakes, and they make lots and lots of mistakes. The trick is to balance experimentation with constant assessment and self-correction. This requires a climate of trust and enthusiasm for finding and fixing problems, rather than a climate that is fearful of making errors.

The January 2001 issue of the Harvard Business Review published a brief article about "The Fear Factor" in expecting staff to learn new technologies. Here’s a quote:

"Because experiments always carry the risk of failure, many employees avoid them.... Companies often unwittingly reinforce this natural tendency when they promote an organizational commitment to 'error-free' work or announce a 'zero tolerance for failure' ethic. Such policies, however well intentioned, can create a culture averse to experimentation and, by extension, to innovation." (p.29)

Good luck!

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Gillian Kerr, Ph.D., C.Psych.

President, RealWorld Systems

gkerr at realworldsystems.net
Read my weblog at http://blog.realworldsystems.net

Disclosure: We have affiliate relationships with some of the services we describe in our columns, but we do not recommend or review services based on their affiliate programs.