IT projects typically fail or do not go to plan, and GIS falls into that bucket.  The Project Management Institute (PMI) has found that only 26% of project succeed.  They also have found that 43% of projects go over budget, 49% of projects are later, and 14% of projects just fail completely.  I think we’ve all been part of projects that have not gone well, but why is that?  What causes these types of projects to go awry?

Planning, or the lack of it.  Having run multiple GIS, IT, and business projects for utilities over the last 20 years, I have found that insufficient planning about various aspects or at different points in a project ultimately leads to problems.  These aspects or points can typically be encompassed in the following list:

Lack of Vision or Roadmap

Utilities do not spend enough time on big and small projects to establish the vision or roadmap of what they are trying to accomplish.  Why are you implementing the technology or functionality?  What problem are you trying to solve or what improvement are you trying to achieve?  Or are you installing technology for the sake of saying you have the new shiny tool on the market?  Not knowing where you are trying to go will lead to a very windy (and expensive) project journey.

Insufficient Planning, Prep, and Design

Yes, I included the lack of planning itself as a bullet point.  But people do not spend enough time preparing and designing their projects.  The lack of detailed and documented requirements ultimately leads to scope creep and loss of focus.  You need to properly study and scope it before you start a project.

Underestimated Complexity

Without a strong vision or roadmap and without proper preparation with documented requirements, you will likely underestimate how complex your project just might be.  Is what you’re aiming to do even technically feasible?  Can your goals be handled by COTS (Commercial, Off-the-Shelf) software or did you just sign yourself up for massive customizations to a COTS platform?  Missing the boat on complexity will increase your costs.

Too Aggressive of a Timeline

When complexity is underestimated, your one-year project just ballooned into two to three years.  And you have very unhappy stakeholders and bosses to answer to.  You need to be realistic about your goals and how long it will take to achieve them.  You also need to give yourself some buffer if you are tackling a project that is breaking new ground in the utility world.

Lack of Resources

If you keep stumbling down this hit list of lack of planning, you will likely run into the issue of underestimating the resources needed to complete the project.  These resources are typically internal in the fact that you have overestimated how much project work your staff can accommodate on top of their daily workload.  This typically leads to you have to bring in contracted resources to try to meet an aggressive timeline, which now just spiked your costs.

Inflexibility or Inadaptability

To add to the fun, IT and GIS projects are started with the idea of changing how you operate with a particular business process or function (or multiples of those items).  But once the rubber hits the road, you get gun shy about actually changing that paper form or business process from 1978 that has been ported through multiple computer systems.  What does that get you?  Customizations.  And likely expensive ones at that to try and replicate paper workflows.  You need to have the courage to change things to a degree that actually takes advantage of the technology you are implementing.

Little to no Organizational Change Management (OCM)

The last of my hit list: not explaining the change to the people who are being impacted.  If you’ve someone navigated everything perfectly with time and budget but you’ve failed to plan for OCM?  Congratulations!  You’ve just spiked your timeline and budget because no one understands what the new system is, why it was implemented, and how they are supposed to use it.  At best, your end users are slow to adopt the new technology, function, or system.  At worst, you incite a small mutiny among your end users.  Neither is fun to explain to upper management.

How do you avoid these problems?

It is not possible to eliminate all potential project pitfalls.  But if you spend time properly preparing and planning a project, you can greatly mitigate said pitfalls.  Can you do this yourself?  Yes, but you could miss things or not be aware of all the nuances of what you might be embarking on.  You don’t know what you don’t know.

I’ve personally been involved with multiple utilities across the nation on all sorts of different business process and technical projects. I’ve been through many industry evolutions and know what the industry is evolving to now. Please reach out if you’d like to discuss your project!