SAP Americas' president, Rob Enslin, on avoiding IT failure [podcast]

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Old-School?: Clearly Rob has been more successful in his career than I, so my opinion may be of questionable value. And clearly his time is critical, so hearing his perspectives was of great value.

But there were a lot of clues in his answers suggesting that he too is contributing to the overarching IT mentality that is contributing to the failure of projects: old thinking. It's not that his answers were old, it's that there is subtle evidences as to how he's framing his perspective on the problems, which is old-school.

This was most evident in his discussion about hitting dates. In one regard he's right: dates should be maintained. But he offered nothing to suggest HOW those dates can be managed. The two most critical dimensions for managing to such dates is to have hard increments (not some big-bang finale) and to adjust the deliverables to meet the dates. There's a whole lot of accountability going on behind the scenes to avoid the all out wonton date slippage he spoke of, but the day of the continuous IT deathmarch is over.

He talked of getting management buy-in. That's one of those "if I had a nickle..." Clearly "getting management buy-in" is NOT the answer: we've failed at either getting it or leveraging it appropriately somewhere along the way. I'm not suggesting its not appropriate to have management buy-in, but 'who', 'how much', 'to what end'? The main reason for management buy-in is simply for funding (either initial or sustained).

But I have a sneaking suspicion that it's management 'buy-in' that makes projects go awry in the first place -- where finger-prodding insists on directions that cause the project to fail miserably on the other end.

Those were just two of the clues...there were others.; Posted by: Rotkapchen Posted on: 04/27/09 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use