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Fighting Human Nature
One of the shocking but true life lessons medical students learn is that most patients lie to their doctors. They downplay their symptoms, deny pains that really exist and swear their test results belong to someone else.
When I first heard that from my daughter (a third-year med student now, but quite the little know-it-all since age 3), I argued the contrary. Surely people want to know the truth, I insisted. "Mom," she sighed, rolling her eyes at me for perhaps the millionth time. "You forget human nature."
I couldn't help but think of human nature as I was reading our cover story ("Project Powerhouse") about the political struggles of project management offices (PMOs). "The people reporting to the PMO only tell you the good stuff," notes one IT director charged with improving project management practices at her company. "But ... if everyone is giving the green light and you're not seeing certain things happen, something should tell you that you're not getting full disclosure."
At their best, these internal watchdog organizations track and manage IT projects, guiding the work of many dedicated IT staffers toward business success. PMOs can also serve as early-warning systems for doomed projects, saving companies staggering amounts of money.
Research repeatedly shows that without the cross-business coordination and oversight of a PMO, projects fail at alarming rates. Gartner predicts that through 2008, 75% of failed projects in the $500,000-plus category won't use a project oversight office. Interestingly, the reverse is also true: 75% of successful projects will be guided by a PMO, Gartner says.
So the question for midsized companies isn't so much whether you should have a project management office at all; it's what kind of PMO will work best for your organization.
In one way or another, many of the stories in this issue turn on project management outcomes. So much of what IT delivers to the business, after all, arrives in the form of projects completed. In our gripping tale of CIO Charlie James of Lodgian Inc., a beleaguered hotel management company that's been in and out of bankruptcy ("Lone Survivor"), you'll see how a series of successful IT projects factored into the company's comeback strategy and this CIO's continuing survival. "IT is essential to keeping on top of everything," as Lodgian's latest CFO notes.
Then in this month's Project Expert column ("Sometimes Failure Is an Option"), author Gopal Kapur highlights the three primary reasons for project failure -- all related to that human desire to kid ourselves. Project managers regularly get handed unrealistic deadlines, inadequate budgets and teams that lack the resources to get the job done. "Even when it's clear that the right resources won't be available for new projects, organizations launch them anyway," Kapur notes.
Is that corporate hubris or human nature?
Finally, we offer up the latest chapter in our ERP Journey column ("Last-Minute Changes Fray the Team's Nerves"), an ongoing CIO diary of one company's most critical project rollout ever. This month, a series of potentially show-stopping change orders appear just weeks before the internal system launch. "Ghosts of ERP project failures haunt the conference room," CIO Les Johnson writes, "reminding me of those mega-companies that have written off hundreds of millions of dollars in failed projects. We call this motivation."
Motivation, huh? Now there's another intriguing side to human nature.
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