Back from a short holiday. It was great to rest up after a long year of outreach, advocacy and just plain work. It helps to be rejuvenated.

You may know that PMI has partnered with Forbes magazine to sponsor programs on innovation and leadership throughout the world. Because of the sponsorship, I read Forbes.com frequently, due to the interesting set of articles and information. Well, I just finished reading an article on Forbes.com and had to share it. Not because I am so pleased with it, but because I am dumbfounded by it.

The article is entitled Fixing IT (as in Information Technology) by Ed Sperling. I am usually provoked one way or the other by articles in Forbes; this time I am provoked in the wrong direction. The short story is the article states there should be five important things to have in your IT department to make is successful:

1. Get better connectivity (agree wholeheartedly... too much variance in connectivity throughout the world)
2. More bandwidth (I am "all over that"... speed and more speed)
3. More research for new IT technology
4. More "schemes" (could have used a better word!) for providing incentives to business to increase research and development, such as better tax breaks (better than leaving it up to the government to fix)
5. More openness (he means better clarity on the "right things" to communicate)

These are all good, no doubt, to put on a company's "to do list" as he states in the article. However, I think he misses probably the most critical "fix" needed in IT... BETTER AND MORE PREDICTABLE RESULTS! All the bandwidth and connectivity in the world isn't going to give what you set out to develop... or satisfy customers. It is results!

I am surprised... no, stunned is more like it... that he would make a to-do list for fixing IT and would leave out the need for better and more predictable results; or that more CIOs (Chief Information Officer) and CTOs (Chief Technology Officer) need to consider more effective PM. Evidently he doesn't think there is any room for improvement. Maybe he hasn't read the CHAOS Chronicles, published by the Standish Group.

If you haven't read the CHAOS Chronicles, you should. It is an ongoing study of a random 15,000 IT projects around the world. The biannual study has been done since 1994 and exposed great insight into the causes for successes and failures of IT projects. The shocker was that in 1994, the percentage of projects that were successful was around 20%... yep, 1 in 5 were successful. The good news/bad news is that the latest study showed that the success rate is up to about 30%... almost (but not quite) 1 in 3.

That is a 50% increase but no gold ring! We still have much to do to increase the success rate and predictability of IT related projects. We do need more research, but we need it into finding the success formula. Well... the CHAOS Chronicles always points out the successful projects have a few things in common, like DISCIPLINED PROJECT MANAGEMENT, and disciplined executive sponsorship.

I believe Mr. Sperling should rethink his to-do list. These items should be on it:

1. Projects aligned to the strategy and strategic objectives.
2. Executive commitment and loyalty to those projects... real understanding and commitment... not only in fair weather.
3. And...yes, you guessed it... a disciplined PM approach.
4. Oh, and if we are going to do research, let's research what works... sort out by experiment Agile vs. Extreme vs. whatever works... then catalog and follow it.

More later.