Reasons Why Information Technology Management Best Practices Are Not Used at Some Organizations

Many reasons why IT management best practices are not used at some organizations. The reasons most often given for not using best practices are lack of time, money pressures, lack of training, basic human weaknesses, and/or a resistant culture. These are excuses that may hide the underlying causes.

I've heard some executives say that best practices developed at other organizations reflect those organizations and not their own. This implies that the practices are somehow fixed and "of one size" and can't be tailored to the organization and project. The Harvard Business School teaches best business practices and it is expected that these practices will be applicable to many types of organizations serving many markets in many countries. The same is true of IT acquisition best practices, which are management best practices pertaining to IT projects. The CMMI-ACQ, Project Management Professional (PMP), and PMBOK teach practices associated with project success that are applicable to organizations and projects in many different environments.

Often the failure to is simply due to a blind optimism, in which everyone, especially the project manager, believes at the outset that the project will be a success, with little thought given to being sure that the practices associated with success will be used. Reality doesn't set in until they start to encounter problems. Too often, the blame is placed on factors they say they cannot control, rather than on their own management approach. They don't connect project failure with the failure to use success-related practices. They don't recognize that they are using failure-related practices.

As many of you pointed out, fundamental reasons for failing to use best practices are the corporate culture, inattention to or ignorance of the requirements for project success, embedded poor policies and practices, and resistance to change. These can be manifested in many ways, such as poorly trained project managers, functional managers who resist the changes a project will bring, and a history of poorly performing projects--and little understanding of why they were not successful. Many organizations today continue to use poor management practices rather than practices associated with success. The question, then, is how can an organization address this problem?

Organizations need to know where IT management "best practices" came from. They grew out of "lessons learned" from successful and unsuccessful projects by many different organizations. They are the practices associated with success, which are capable of successfully coping with the complexity and uncertainty associated with IT projects. An example of a best practice is the use of a work breakdown structure. Another best practice is broad participation of stakeholders in the project. Organizations that adopt IT management best practices such as these have a much greater likelihood of having successful projects than those organization that do not.

When a senior executive in an organization recognizes the need to adopt best practices, he or she should strive to implement the following steps to move the organization in the right direction.

An orientation program for corporate executives is usually a good first step to addressing the problem. Senior executives determine the culture, the values, the priorities, and what is rewarded. If they don't think best practices for IT planning and project management are important, the organization is likely to have poor project managers, poor projects, and many project failures. Corporate executives often need a better understanding of the requirements for project success, including the use of management best practices, on-going executive support for projects, and recognition, incentives, and rewards for successful project managers and team members.

Another key step is to identify and select the specific best practices the organization needs to adopt, tailor them as needed to the organization, and then standardize on them and "institutionalize" them--that is, make them an integral part of how the organization does business. All of the project managers should be expected to use certain standard practices and their individual performance should be evaluated on how well they use them.

A third key step is to provide professional training for project managers and others in the use of the best practices. In addition, the training of project managers should include not only the technical skills they need but also the "soft skills" they must have to work effectively with customers and their own staffs. Encouraging staff to obtain the Project Management Professional (PMP) certification can also facilitate adopting and using best practices.

A fourth step is to establish an "audit group" (it usually has a more appealing name) to monitor internally-proposed projects from the planning stage all the way through system implementation and operation. A key job of this group is to identify business cases, acquisition strategies, and proposals that use shortcuts, ignore best practices, or reflect poor planning and decision making. The audit group can prevent a proposal from being considered for funding until such flaws are corrected and it can help to improve the management of on-going projects as well as implemented systems. The audit group is, in effect, a monitor of best practices and a source of feedback to IPTs on how to improve.

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