A Look Inside

If you put yourself in a room of business leaders and IT managers and ask how many have had a failed implementation of some technology application, hardware or service I would estimate that nearly every hand in the room would go up. Ask how many have had an implementation that didn’t fail but could have experienced more success and again most (if not all) of the hands in the room would go up. Too often IT implementations fail completely or fail to realize their full potential because they aren’t set up for success from the beginning.

While there are many ways to insure that an implementation of a technology product or service succeeds here are what I consider three key elements you can use to insure that your next implementation is a success.

1. Be sure it’s the right tool – Too often it is easy to go after what is shiny, new and exciting. Business leaders do it because their peers or the marketers and sales people they are listening to are saying that the tool is a game-changer. IT managers do it because they want to play with the latest and greatest. Do your homework. Understand first what you are trying to accomplish and then understand how the tool fulfills those goals. Take the time to investigate other tools that would help you achieve your goals and compare their featureset. Pick the tool that most closely fits with the your requirements not the one that’s the most exciting or publicized.

2. Establish and maintain sufficient executive sponsorship – Too often the key decision maker selects the application or service and then turns over the implementation to the team members responsible for the day-to-day activities and moves on to their next task. The result is that the implementation lacks an authoritative leader and, even if completed, has the potential to get lost in the quagmire of everything else that the business is trying to accomplish. At the outset the executive sponsorship needs to be established and that person should be engaged throughout the project insuring that milestones are met and taking it beyond the implementation phase into steady-state where the true value will be realized.

3. Create the measurements for declaring success – It’s not enough to just complete an implementation yet too often the measuring stick’s last tick mark for determining success is the final milestone on the project plan of the implementation phase. Huge mistake. Determine some tangible ways to measure your goals to insure they’ve been reached. Don’t take what you were hoping to achieve and just toss it into the winds of every day business activities and hope it falls into place. Put the people and processes in place in order to guarantee you succeed at what you are expecting to accomplish.

There are lots of details within and around each of these actions, but if you have these core elements in place you are setting your IT  implementation up for success from the start.

What has your experience been? Am I missing any key elements? If you could list your own three, what would you have on that list?