The Recipe for a-Successful IT Project

Continued from page: 1

Monday, June 18, 2007

The right team attitude
The other critical key ingredient that the respondents hinted at was teamwork. Unless you have everyone pitching in, and willing to help out, the project just won't take off. Construction of the team is equally important.

Today, having an IT team alone isn't sufficient. You need to bring in all the stakeholders in the project, like customers/users, vendors, peers, and even the management. Everyone has some role to play in the project's success.

A user or customer would give real live feedback about the project, so the project head must be open to receiving all the criticism. Likewise, the management would steer the project towards delivering the business benefits. The vendors would help you identify the requirements, and the IT team will help you put it all together.

But in order to ensure that everyone pitches in and does their role, the project head must have the skills to arouse interest amongst them towards the project. For this, it's essential that the project manager knows how to talk to different members of the team in a language that they understand.
So the management would mostly understand business language, the IT team would be more comfortable with technical jargon, and the users prefer plain simple English (or even their local language).

Ability to build a team
We asked our respondents to identify the essential skills that every project head must possess to manage an IT project. Again, though we received a variety of answers, the key skill that emerged here was team management.

How well can a project head manage his/her team, mentor and guide them, and keep them motivated? You must be able to build a real strong team, and the only way to do that is to have excellent interpersonal equations with everyone.

There were three other key skills that emerged besides team building. One was that the project head must have a clear vision about the project and its deliverables, and the other two essential skills were business and technical knowledge.

We noticed an interesting pattern as far as business and technical knowledge were concerned. While most respondents whole-heartedly agreed that business domain knowledge was a must to run an IT project, they were not so unanimous when it came to technical knowledge.

Here, the opinion was split almost equally into two. One side said that only a basic understanding of technology is all that's required, while the other side said that a complete understanding of technology is essential for deploying an IT project.

Thankfully, nobody said that technical knowledge was not required at all! The bottomline is that IT deployment is increasingly being subjected to business norms, so the project head must have the requisite knowledge of business to do full justice to an IT project.

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