The risk of IT projects failing has never been higher. A staggering 40 percent of information-technology projects fail, costing the average IT organization $1 million each year, according to a joint study by TechRepublic and its parent Gartner Group.
Imtech Telecom Global find within the networking/telecommunications arena the same statistics can apply. Sadly, many organisations believe that risk completely evaporates as one gets more adept at providing a particular service. In fact, risks don’t go away as we improve, the bar just gets higher. In 2008, the expectations for hardware and software implementation and migration projects have never been greater: more, faster, with less. Raise expectations and you raise risk; it’s that simple.
In today’s business environment, management and staff must be able to deal with intricate and unclear interrelationships and dependencies among technologies, data, tasks, activities, processes and people. In order to effectively manage risks, we need to take the middle ground and highlight lurking risks, estimate their impact, optimise our response, and monitor for change. These are the essential skills of Risk Management.
A good generic risk management process should include the following five steps:
- identification of program or project specific risks;
- detailed analysis of each risk;
- development of plans to address risks;
- active monitoring and tracking of risks;
- and use of metrics to monitor the risk management process.
By actively managing project risks, the probability of experiencing first-hand the consequences of failure can be greatly reduced.
There are a number of key factors and risks that impact across multiple projects. One of the most common is a lack of realism. The industry has a tendency to over-promise and under-budget.
A second major factor is that organisations tend to be sloppy in terms of risk management. Poor project management practice when pervasive throughout deployment will take a project down faster than any other type of risk except the lack of realism.
The third major factor revolves around inadequate planning. We plan our projects based on tasks that must be done, without so much as a nod of the head toward tasks that might have to be done. Such plans reflect how the effort would proceed if nothing ever went wrong. No wonder we’re plagued with time and cost over runs and quality shortfalls; something always goes wrong.
An additional factor is ‘unrealistic schedules’. Schedule risk in IT is huge and the majority of projects either deliver later than desired, or deliver on time with less functionality than expected.
The process of risk management can very quickly lead to little or no management and become very messy because it deals with potentialities, with trade-offs and with futures. To really understand what’s going on with these intricacies, your thought processes have to be able to expand to incorporate all the nuances. It’s like the old saying cheaper, faster, better - pick any two.
In managing risk, you often can identify and prioritise the risks, but you may not be able to mobilise to actually deal with them. And if you manage to mobilise the right resources to deal with one set of risks, you will simultaneously be making a conscious choice not to mobilise against some other set of risks, which effectively means that you are accepting those risks.
These complexities mean that risk management is usually a task best done by somebody who has some experience in the area, appropriately trained and willing to learn from their and other’s mistakes. If you pro actively manage risks properly, then you will spend little time reactively putting out unexpected fires, thus freeing up more time delivering your project based on current, accurate, and easy-to-understand risk information
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Imtech Telecom Global offers worldwide network design solutions that encompass a range of technology solutions and full customised managed services. Our expertise in project deployment with full risk management capabilities is an invaluable asset to Imtech’s “project cycle” and we are able to help all organisations make a success of their projects.