consumer arriving at her meticulously decorated parking lot only to be greeted by red-carpet, valet-parking greeters who offered advice on today’s fresh strawberries and other specials. She envisioned real lighting so people could actually see the products they were buying. She saw in-store advisors helping people make healthy and economical food choices or letting them know where to find the specials of the week. She saw a store with carpet on the floor instead of the standard issue, cream-colored linoleum. She saw employees in every aisle to help shoppers make informed decisions and lots of checkout stands so no one is waiting in line to spend money at Sally’s Market! In other words, it was a vision, and now a reality, of the perfect grocery-shopping experience seen by Sally through the eyes of her customers. It was as if she thought of every last detail of the grocery-shopping experience and scripted it out like a ride at Disneyland.
COULD WE DO THIS? Then, I started to think of the implications for our business and our industry. You see, the failure rate for IT projects has long been a concern for both business and IT managers. But now failures seem to be on the rise again, as recession-era budgets cut back on needed preparation and support. The costs of failed projects in terms of time, money, opportunity and morale can be huge. I’m constantly hearing this from IT managers in all walks of life. They all sound alike, and their headaches are the same: A third of their time is spent dealing with IT project failures, and they don’t know how to stop the failures from happening. How could this be? After all, technology is supposed to make our lives simpler. For business, it’s supposed to help us run our organizations faster, better and cheaper, thereby freeing up time and money for more strategic activities. Instead, IT project failures consume corporate IT managers, eating up their time, energy and thin budgets. But why? Is it the technology? No, not usually. Is it the complexity? Maybe. Or is it something else that has been eluding tens of thousands of IT managers for decades? For me, the reason is simple: The IT industry does not provide a systematic way to hire and train IT consultants with the right technical skills and the right soft, or customer-service, skills, nor does it provide an effective system to monitor and manage the consultants once onsite and on the job. Think of it this way. You wouldn’t want a newly minted doctor performing complex brain surgery on you without years of specialized training, internships, residencies, shadowing and certifications. Similarly, you wouldn’t want a newly licensed pilot flying your transcontinental flight on his first day on the job. Why should enterprise IT projects be any different? After all, these are the same systems that run our businesses, pay our employees, manage our customer service and allow us to buy a book from Amazon specially selected just for us because it’s been meticulously tracking our purchases for years. So, we started to think: What if we could create that kind of system for the IT projects we were delivering? What if we could start from scratch, envisioning the perfect customer service 34
American Management Association
MWORLD WINTER 2013-14