Less than half IT projects succeed. According to the Standish Group’s 2013 CHAOS Report:
- 39% of IT projects succeed, delivering requirements on-time and on-budget
- 18% of IT projects fail, cancelled outright before completion or delivered but never used,
- 43% of IT projects were ‘challenged’, delivered late, over budget, or otherwise did not meet customer expectations.
Gartner studies show that 75% of US IT projects are considered failures by their initiators, meaning the deliverables did not fundamentally meet the need, were late, or exceeded budget.
Whether using Gartner’s or Standish Group’s numbers, one thing is clear – too many IT projects fall short.
Oakman Consulting has an enviable track record of project recovery. The causes of IT project failures are numerous, but frequently project failure is not rooted in the project’s technology itself. Projects more frequently fail due to gaps in expectations and communications.
Oakman Consulting recognizes that aligning expectations is essential to meeting the client’s needs and successfully delivering the project. Oakman’s approach to delivery is methodology-independent (and can make use of any client-preferred methodology), but always aligns expectations throughout the project.
This starts with obtaining a clearly stated objective, a foundation upon which the expectations of the client and service provider(s) are aligned. For projects with numerous stakeholder functional areas, producing clearly stated objectives to which all stakeholders can subscribe is the first essential deliverable of a successful, efficient, project. Alignment of project scope, requirements, testing results and implementation expectations are similarly important.
Depending on the project objective, John Oakman will lead and deliver some or all of the following as needed:
- Researching and determining project objective
- Estimating the fully-loaded cost of meeting the objective
- Forming a team to effectively, efficiently, meet the objective
- Designing the solution
- Building the solution
- Implementing the solution
- Post-implementation optimization of solution performance
- Continuous leadership, management, communication and reporting
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