Waterloo prof - How to get stakeholders on side

Watch video of interview with Prof Peter Carr

Length: 8 minutes. Type of file: Windows Media Video

Hi, I’m Joaquim Menezes, Web Editor of IT World Canada. Welcome to this episode in our IT Executive Development Series, which focuses on the topic of ‘Project Management.’ To better understand the key principles of effective project management, we’ll be talking to Professor Peter Carr, director of the Masters in Management Science program at the University of Waterloo. We’ll draw on professor Carr’s insights and his many years of experience in this area.

Prof. Carr, prior to any major IT rollout, what steps should a company take to ensure that the deployment is a success and its goals are achieved?

I think that one of the most important things a company needs to do when its planning its projects, and getting the things in place [to ensure] that project is successful are first of all around the stakeholders: ensuring that the right stakeholders have been identified, particularly in an IT project – the user community, and that there’s a mechanism for them to be involved in the project design and monitoring the progress of the project as it proceeds.

Some experts say in big projects multi-stage deployment is a good idea, because lessons learned in one phase about what works and what doesn’t can be applied to subsequent phases, and you also avoid repeating the same mistakes. Would you agree with this perspective?

I would completely agree that as projects become larger and larger (and I think this is a major issue now for organizations…the scale of the projects they are dealing with are becoming so huge) to be able to break those projects up to their constituent parts, learn from their different phases as the project proceeds is absolutely the correct thing to do.

Quite often IT managers complain that despite several meetings with vendors to discuss the scope of a project, the final result didn’t conform to what was promised and expected. How may communications between enterprise IT teams and vendors be improved so that there’s a greater congruence between expectations and what the vendor actually delivers?

I think the problem of the project not being delivered in the way that the receiver of the project expects is, of course a very serious one. And what there’s a need to do is at the beginning of the project to be absolutely clear about what the expectations are – to define those very carefully.

But then as the project proceeds to have very close communications between the vendors and buyers of the project so that changes can be made at an earlier stage rather that just receiving the results from the vendor and those not being what we expected them to be.

In doing that today, the technologies that are increasingly becoming available that enable collaboration between organizations, their suppliers and their customers, are going to be critical to improving that.

IT managers are understandably reluctant to talk about failed projects. But is there a way IT teams can turn failure into something positive and actually benefit from it?

I do think that one of the most important things we can do is to learn from the failures that we make in our projects and, of course, the statistics tell us that many, many IT projects fail.

As much as we should learn from and look at those projects that are successful, I think looking at the projects that fail probably teaches us much more about the things that we have to look out for and things that may cause us problems, as we complete our own projects.