Nowadays IT initiatives generally fail for business, organizational or cultural reasons. Technology screw-ups occur all the time but that’s one of the realities to be managed. Success or failure ultimately depends on how project leadership manages the full range of technical and non-technical issues.

Blogger and Enterprise Architect, Mike Kavis, who worked on many large enterprise initiatives over the years and understand what should or should not the next enterprise initiative can avoid failure. He created ten guidelines describing critical areas of weakness in many projects:

1. Poor Communication
Enterprise projects usually impact a large amount of people. This requires constant communications to all levels of people throughout the organization. A strong communication strategy can help with this.

2. Underestimating or ignoring impact of change
This is another way of saying poor change management. People need to know WIIFM (what’s in it for me). Resistance to change can kill any project. Your initiative must have a champion who carries a lot of clout.

3. Lack of Leadership
IT Leadership requires excellence in three key areas: Technology, Business, and People. If the leadership is missing any of the three components you are doomed.

4. Lack of strong executive sponsorship
For these projects to succeed you must have somebody high up in the organization with a lot of clout. There will be many obstacles to overcome and key decisions to make.

5. Poor project management
Scope creep is a project killer. Managing scope and requirements are the key to any project. Often, large enterprise initiatives have a ton of logistics that need to be identified and managed accordingly.

6. Poor Planning
This could also fall into a category of unrealistic expectations. Initiatives like SOA require a well thought out strategy.

7. Trying to do it cheap
Another common mistake. Organizations want it all, but they don’t want to invest the time and money. I have seen many projects get completed using this strategy, but they almost always run over budget, are late, are missing many features, and have many various quality or process issues due to the quick-n-dirty approach.

8. Lack of technical knowledge
I’ll use Enterprise Architecture as an example here. If the person leading an EA initiative does not have a solid understanding of architecture, application development, security, infrastructure, process, and the business, you might as well not even start this initiative.

9. Lack of sound business case
You can get all of the other issues right but if your solution has no business context then you are wasting your time.

10. Poor vendor management
Somebody hires a high priced group of consultants and let’s them run wild. You should make sure that what they build meets your requirements, your standards, your needs, and your timelines.

Successful leaders create project success on the foundation of skillfully managing people, process, and technology. While this perspective may appear obvious, the experience and wisdom needed to make IT projects successful is not common at all.

[Via Mike Kavis]