Many IT Projects Are Delivered Late

There I said it. It’s always been talked about in ‘off-the-record’ discussions but nobody really wanted to admit it or put some real hard facts behind it… yet we all knew it existed. The ‘it’ that I’m referring to is the probability of a project being delayed and costing more money than expected.

A recent study conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit, on behalf of HP concluded that “25 percent or more of IT projects are late“. If you think about that, that’s a pretty powerful statement… and its well backed up. In our experience, we have seen a lot of organizations fall in to this category.

Such delays not only cost more money to deliver the same benefit, they divert corporate resources and the opportunity cost can be anywhere from delayed product launches, loss of anticipated savings and the associated cost of that money, as well as increased regulatory exposure, specifically in the case of a workforce management implementation.

On the other hand, succeeding in delivering IT projects on time and on budget gives companies significant advantage over their competition. It allows them to focus on their strategy and lets the technology deliver efficiencies to their business.

When technology is used to automate manual processes, organizatoins gain increased efficiencies, and free up expensive talent to focus on high-value tasks. Within the realm of workforce management, this means that store managers no longer need to manually calculate employee’s timesheets and then key them in to a payroll system. Or payroll no longer has to manually calculate whether an employee is eligible for statutory holiday pay. Or managers needn’t spend 1/2 a day per week creating a store schedule, only to tweak and adjust it 4 more times before it’s ‘right’.

I think you get the point…