How Can You Overcome A Failed IT Project?

Previously, failed IT projects were high-priced flops, taking way too long and going way over budget.

Those setbacks still occur, but IT failure today is often quite different than in the past thanks to Agile, devops, continuous delivery and the emergence of fail-fast practices. These methodologies help minimize the odds of projects going stunningly awry, and yet IT projects do still fail, often in more confounding ways.

The Rise of Agile and Automation

Agile and automation can head off a project failure before a total collapse happens.

Because of its iterative nature, Agile has gone long way to reducing the risks of a spectacular project collapse, and automation has made the development process more efficient than ever. Coding the project in pieces, automating the assessing of it, iterating until it’s clean gives a project a big safety net. You’re looking for mistakes more frequently and as a result, the output ought to be greater quality. The net result is the ability to release new features faster and reduce high failure potential.

Automation also helps to remove human error from the process, including bad code, network configuration or load balancing. The removal of human error is particularly prevalent in scripting and applications deployments and networking.

Project Management Adjustments

Redefining the project’s parameters is among the best ways to avoid project failure, and shifts in company hierarchy can expedite this. Managers from various units ought to be expected to collaborate, move rapidly and adjust course at a moment’s notice. To allow for better flexibility, some companies give decision makers significant autonomy for course correction.

The strong project management values that recently passed through the IT world has made it easier to better articulate what projects need to achieve and what they shouldn’t, which more effectively manages the risk of failure. The movement has changed the meaning of success away from the on- time, on-budget requirements to meeting company goals.

Learning Via (Fast-)Failure

Changing mindsets around failure have helped reshape business attitudes around risk. Some businesses actually seek out failure; provided that damage is minimal, lessons are learned and employees are getting wiser about their methodologies.

Part of this transition around the idea of failure might be as a result of fast-fail tools and techniques. Sandbox environments, pilots and iterative processes restrict the quantity of damage that can occur if something goes astray, mitigating the risk of a big catastrophe happening at the conclusion.

Failure is simply a reality of tech. You should be adjusting, adapting and ultimately delivering. If you’re regularly trying new approaches, then you might also be failing regularly. Therefore, project failure isn’t as big as it used to be.

The days of losing a year to a single massive failure are pretty much over, but failing regularly is pretty much here to stay.

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