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Down the rat hole, happily
July 12, 2005
Rob Austin offers a provocative point of view on the management of IT projects in the new edition of CIO. The Harvard Business School professor argues that it's a waste of time to try to impose on IT installations "the orderly, disciplined and predictable sorts of processes that we achieve in engineering and factory settings." IT projects are by their nature messy and unpredictable, not only because "technologies change rapidly" but also because of the "uncertainty that arises from [the] inability to envision the new system or the new business process that might result from its installation." We can't rely on the "machinery of modern management," says Austin, because "in IT, we are almost always figuring out what the right thing is while we are building it" and "that's a matter of problem-finding, diagnosis, creative problem-solving and experimentation, all in real-time."
Austin makes some good points about the nature of IT work and how it should be managed - points that those of us who have argued for more rigor in IT project management should keep in mind. But he overstates his case, perpetuating the destructive myth that IT exists in its own world, beyond the bounds of traditional management practice. "The fact is," he writes about IT installations, "unanticipated problems (and opportunities) will arise during a project. Any management approach that assumes otherwise is unrealistic." That's absolutely true, of course, but it's certainly not unique to IT projects. Any big, complicated project, whether installing an enterprise application or building a factory or designing a new product, involves uncertainties and will take many unforeseen twists and turns. That's precisely why smart companies have developed rigorous, well-defined processes for project management.
While it's true that IT projects will never be perfectly orderly, perfectly disciplined or perfectly predictable - what in business management is? - that doesn't mean that we shouldn't seek to make them more orderly, more disciplined and more predictable. The reason that so many big IT projects have failed is not because they've been managed with too much discipline; it's because they've been managed with too little. The last thing IT managers, vendors and consultants need is a rhetorical "get out of jail free" card for bungled projects.
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