The Failure Of The IT Projects In Project Management

Write a Report on Failure of the IT Project.

 

 

Introduction

The report will discuss in detail about the failure of the IT projects and reasons behind it along with two examples where the project failed miserably. All kinds of companies perform two types of work in which one are based on operations and other is based on projects and because of the repetitive quality of operation, it can be convenient to systematically organize the processes (An et al., 2014). At the same time, since there is fixed start and end dates to the project, it becomes unique and also consists of different kinds of team players. It is also more challenging to properly systematize and also grow right kinds of methods and procedures.

Following are some of the reasons for the failure of the IT project: -

Problem in communication: there are number of people who become part of an IT project and this is why keeping an open communication among all these people become very challenging. This further makes a negative kind of impact on the project and this further leads to communication issues like less clarity about the roles and duties or lack in understanding the needs of the project and mismanagement while fulfilling the needs of the projects (An et al., 2014).

 

There are times when the employees dedicate their time mostly on finding the right solution instead of really understanding the main or the actual issue. They usually fail to understand the basic facts about the issue.

 

Inadequate planning: it is important to understand that planning is very important since it save the company from any kind of poor performance. This especially is the case with most of the IT projects. They require proper planning and ironically, the IT department doesn’t spend time to just sit and figure out on how to achieve the targeted goal. This is why it leads to problems like improper objective or failure to number of factors in proper money or time (Kaur and Sengupta, 2013).

 

Improper technologies: following are some of the factors in a project that can lead to failure in terms of technicality: -

 

Improper usage of language which happens since the different preferences of the leader of the team.

 

An inexperienced employee in IT project can be big issue since he or she will face problems in properly fulfilling the program (Kaur and Sengupta, 2013).

Following are strategies to avoid the reasons of failures

It is very important to ensure that each employee of the team or department is well-aligned with the needs of the project as well as their role is ensures that it can be properly fulfilled. Also there must be frequent or continuous communication among all the parties (Jørgensen, 2014).

 

It is also very important to understand issue well and then find the appropriate solution for it. It is important for the organizations to understand the issue in proper manner and from every perspective and then find the right solution for the same that can help in actually improving the practices in the organization (Jørgensen, 2014).

 

A right plan must contain right procedure, processes, right technique and the software. Moreover, right people must be assigning for the right job in the project.

 

In the ends, the company has to very careful while aligning the technology with the existing program. In addition it is also important to ensure that every person has the right role and he or she must be capable of finishing it properly (Sweis, 2015).

Following are some of the examples of IT projects that have been unsuccessful: -

Civilian IT project of NHS: - NHS stands for National Health Services and it is one of the public funded systems in healthcare department in UK. It is considered one of the biggest and largest healthcare structures perceived as single payer as well.

The organization made some amazing plans to make a single electronic healthcare record structure for every citizen of the country. The main aim was to provide services to forty thousand GPs and be available in as many hospitals as possible. This is why, the project is considered as one of the biggest projects in IT (Hussain et al., 2016). However, it is important to understand that rate of failure in IT industry is very high and since the project is one of the largest, it was obvious that it was conducted with lot of risk as well as there were issues as well. It is also important to note the project was funded by taxpayer and it led to high chances of failure and the case become more popular. 

The project initiated with big plans which were too grand for them to handle and they started with rapidly. Also it was astronomical by size and it is always very challenging to finish it in successful manner. As per the facts, the project aims to serve almost forty thousand GPs and cover more than three hundred hospitals and further claimed to be one of the biggest projects in civil IT (Hussain et al., 2016). In addition, it all came down to central core where the EHR facility was elaborated one of the significant reason of huge IT project fail. The overall system which was provided through EHRs was initiated by designing by huge team in central and further intended as complete and huge replacement for so many HER systems. In addition it will be better to base the work on the evolutionary kinds of acquisition which means it is important to mention, execute and also deploy along with right evaluation a sequence of finished IT systems. It is also a process that must be control by the associated stakeholders who are involved in the project. The authority should also be left from starting with all the hospitals and other normal practitioners and their trust to get systems in IT that is perfect for the number of priorities and environment. There must also be some kind adherence to reduced constraints or limitations and also use some services located centrally (Srivastava et al., 2016).

Star Wars program of US Reagen based administration: the cost of the project was around thirty billion USD which is equal to expenditure of around sixty to hundred billion USD in the year 2013. The initiative was also called as strategic defense initiative or SDI. In addition, it is also proposed to utilize some weapons at ground level and also exist in space in order to shoot it down the incoming missiles coming from Soviet Union (Srivastava et al., 2016). The project was almost impossible to execute by just using the technology at that time. Also it is also crucial to develop the required technology that will be needed almost ten year ago of efforts. Also, at this time, Soviet Union was non-existent and the project never developed completely however, in today’s time, it exist on defense agency and the main aims is on the short term anti-ballistics. Following are some reasons for its failure in US military projects: -

The investment was very risky since the project of the military is commonly elaborated with a lot of military upside that has the power to balance the low chances of achieving any success (García-Quevedo et al., 2016).

The project aimed at spending more money than some brains to actually implement it properly. In this project the expenditure becomes an end.

Number of authors and researchers also claims that Soviet Union bankrupted since the whole efforts was after keeping align with USA. The R&D projects of US are quite ambitious and Soviet Union tried to follow the same strategy. this is why, the Star Wars series was one of the most unrealistic projects by the military of US which was expected to fail however still accomplish some success in indirect manner (Almgren, 2014).

Conclusion

It is important to understand that many projects that did not finished on estimated time or were over budget or the scope varied over a period of time are more prone to failure. There are number of many issues or failures that can actually take the project down as disused in the report (Albliwi et al., 2014). The main aim of the essay was to understand some basic reasons for failure since many teams in project are based on at least three kinds of players that also include management at executive level or managers involved in projects as well as the team members or other kind of resources. All such issues are discussed in the essay along with two real time failure of big IT projects and the reasons behind it (Creasy, 2017).

Reference

An, J., Quercia, D. and Crowcroft, J., 2014, April. Recommending investors for crowdfunding projects. In Proceedings of the 23rd international conference on World wide web (pp. 261-270). ACM.

Kaur, R. and Sengupta, J., 2013. Software process models and analysis on failure of software development projects. arXiv preprint arXiv:1306.1068.

Jørgensen, M., 2014. Failure factors of small software projects at a global outsourcing marketplace. Journal of systems and software, 92, pp.157-169.

Sweis, R., 2015. An Investigation of Failure in Information Systems Projects: The Case of Jordan. Journal of Management Research, 7(1), pp.173-185.

Hussain, A., Mkpojiogu, E.O. and Kamal, F.M., 2016. The Role of Requirements in the Success or Failure of Software Projects. International Review of Management and Marketing, 6(7S).

Srivastava, S.K., Prasad, P. and Varma, S.P., 2016. Evolving predictor variable estimation model for Web engineering projects. Covenant Journal of Informatics and Communication Technology, 2(1).

García-Quevedo, J., Segarra-Blasco, A. and Teruel, M., 2016. Financial constraints and the failure of innovation projects.

Almgren, K., 2014. Information technology project management processes and practices: A comprehensive study for successful implementation of IT projects. International Journal of Business and Social Science, 5(11).

Albliwi, S., Antony, J., Abdul Halim Lim, S. and van der Wiele, T., 2014. Critical failure factors of Lean Six Sigma: a systematic literature review. International Journal of Quality & Reliability Management, 31(9), pp.1012-1030.

Creasy, T., 2017. SUBJECT TO REVIEW: Factors that lead to success or failure in healthcare projects. Quality Progress, 50(2), p.24.