In the interview with Roger Dannenhauer, owner of RDTransformation, we talk today about the success and failure of IT projects.
Companies can turn a lot of money into value—or burn it—in IT projects! In digital transformation, the risk is even higher because a true transformation goes much deeper than a standard IT project. In an interview with Roger Dannenhauer, owner of RDTransformation, we discuss today the success and failure of IT projects.
DIGITAL FUTUREmag: In your opinion, what are the reasons for the failure of IT projects?
Roger Dannenhauer: In 2001, I read a remarkable book by colleagues at PwC about a global study on why projects succeed or fail. The colleagues had given it to their clients in the hope that projects would improve. Overall, there was one common denominator: whether projects succeed or fail is already decided at the start of the project.
DIGITAL FUTUREmag: I don’t think many readers would have expected that. What leads you to this assumption?
Roger Dannenhauer: Between 2012 and 2014, a comprehensive and in-depth study led to the book TURN AROUND. When projects are upside down and classic project management fails. Half of the book focuses on the evolution of methodology. The second half deals with people—more precisely, with the “inner state” of people. How people are shaped, socialized, and from that, how they think and act.
DIGITAL FUTUREmag: In your opinion, what is a good recipe for success?
Roger Dannenhauer: It’s about parameters of reality that are not considered in any management theory, consulting approach, company, or project. Projects don’t fail because people don’t know how to run projects. They fail for reasons that lie completely outside the perception of those responsible—and so, naturally, they cannot be controlled or managed. If you take this into account in your digital transformation, you have the most powerful control tool for your projects. The chance of success doubles. At the very least, you save a lot of money, time, and nerves.
DIGITAL FUTUREmag: Could you be more specific? What three most important instructions would you give to a project team at the start?
Roger Dannenhauer: You’re asking for instructions for the project team. However, as we now know, the dice have already been cast at the start of the project. The project team can only execute (which is why agile projects flip this approach). Before the project starts, the following instructions would apply:
1. Honesty: Wherever projects are sold beautifully, the calculation for them is distorted, reality cannot be stated in status reports because management doesn’t want to hear it, Excel experts reduce costs without wanting to know the impact, times and costs have to be recorded incorrectly—wherever people lie to themselves, where politics is at play—the project team should theoretically refuse to work. In practice, however, this isn’t possible. Some managers only listen when the forest is burning. This is why project crises arise.
2. Calmness is power: Wherever projects are approached either too naively or too ambitiously, where projects are pushed through, where an attempt is made to squeeze even more into “full thermoses,” where a culture of heroism prevails, where people aren’t allowed to admit they’re overwhelmed, and where time takes precedence over quality, the project is in the yellow or red zone.
3. Project benefits: Wherever projects are initiated because “Google does it” or because it’s currently trendy, where the latest management method or leadership trend is hastily implemented across the company, where signs of the times are missed and a digital project must now be launched quickly, where people pursue innovative projects for career advancement—budgets will be wasted because the entire project is set up incorrectly.
DIGITAL FUTUREmag: We thank you for this interview and wish all project managers a good “inner state.”
The interview was conducted by Michael Mattis, Managing Director of AMC Media Network GmbH & Co. KG and organizer of the DIGITAL FUTUREcongress
Contact details:
RDTransformation
Roger Dannenhauer
0160 9663 5566
www.rogerdannenhauer.de