My old prof, Derrick Neufeld, from the Richard Ivey School of Business explains why trillions (with at t-r) dollars of IT projects fail every year. So why do they fail?
Reason #1: Project managers fail to get understand the business requirements. (In Six Sigma this is Rule#1. Perhaps we should start hiring more Black Belts and fewer PMPs! Yes, I likes this idea.)
Reason #2: The systems users are not involved and reject the system design even if it meets business requirements.
Reason #3: Senior management is not involved. Neufeld writes, “Leaders that may be very good at managing human resources or managing financial resources are much less confident and maybe feel less competent to manage technological resources, so they often abdicate those sorts of decisions.”
And let’s not leave out the whole change management effort that is also required. It’s nice to install some new technology but without buy in from the users it is destined to end up as shelfware.
Remember, it is a poor musician who blames his instrument.