Assessment 2: Analyzing IT Project Failures and Mitigation Strategies

This report analyzes the common reasons for IT project failures, including unclear requirements, lack of user participation, insufficient support from senior managers, and inappropriate skills. It proposes strategies to address these issues, such as clearly defining project objectives, increasing user involvement, ensuring senior management support, and selecting appropriate technologies. The report provides two real-world examples: the failure of the Instructional Technology Initiative (ITI) project in Los Angeles and the technical border control system project in the UK, illustrating the practical implications of these factors. The conclusion emphasizes the importance of thorough research and risk assessment to avoid project failures, offering a comprehensive overview of project management challenges and solutions in the IT sector. This document is available on Desklib, a platform that provides past papers and solved assignments for students.

Project Management for IT Professionals
Assessment 2
1. Introduction
With the development of IT technology, IT projects also develop rapidly in terms of goals
and scale (Alami 2016). Furthermore, although advances in technology can make the process
of project execution easier, failure can still happen. According to Al-Ahmad et al. (2009), a
study involving thousands of IT projects shows 16% were completed on time, 32% were
suspended and the remaining 52% were completed after the schedule and spent more than
budget. Reasons for IT project failure can be attributed to functional issues, stakeholder
issues, management issues and technical difficulties. IT projects, especially which are related
to project innovation development, are considered a difficult task. This essay will focus on
four common reasons for IT project failure and proposes corresponding strategies to avoid
them. Meanwhile, two specific examples about unsuccessful IT projects will be shown.

Project Management for IT Professionals
Assessment 2
2. Reasons and strategies for IT project failure
2.1. Unclear requirements
First of all, unclear requirements are one of the most common reasons for IT project failure
(Black 2018). Usually, the project manager only clarifies the problems that the customers or
stakeholders want to solve, without considering the desired result which may be different
from project developer (Black 2018). Meanwhile, temporary project change which is another
form of unclear requirements causes project failure. The project team has planned the scope
of work and the workflow according to the original requirements, but at this time the project
manager needs to adjust the project details or add additional requirements. This usually
causes the project cannot execute as originally planned which further cause the project
failure.
Project objectives should be defined and notify all the stakeholders during the project
inception phase (Jayaraman et al. 2015). If the project needs to be modified in the later
process, the decision-making level needs to consider carefully and evaluate the risks. This
process helps developers to obtain detailed requirements in achieving the project goals.
2.2. Not enough user exposure
Secondly, lack of user participation is another common problem. User participation is
essential for IT project to gather demand and user feedback, in order to increasing the
efficiency of the implementation (Jayaraman et al. 2015). According to Discenza and Forman
(2007), if end users and project members work together for a period of time, the possibility of
success projects will be increase. Usually, users only interact with the project developer
during the final stages of the project. As a result, the project is unable to benefit from the
user’s specific advices. Meanwhile, it is difficult for project managers to change or adjust the
specific demand at the end of a project (Black 2018).
To ensure that projects are not implemented in a vacuum, end users should participate and
experience IT projects as early and frequently as possible(Black 2018). If the users
participate at an earlier stage, the project managers will have sufficient time to adjust the
project to meet the user’s goals and expectations. Meanwhile, the project managers need to

Project Management for IT Professionals
Assessment 2
continuously attract new users to participate as the project progresses and the situation
changes.
2.3. Lack of support from senior managers
Thirdly, the absence of IT senior managers is a key reason of IT project failure. According to
Al-Ahmad et al. (2009), 97% successful projects are managed by experienced senior
managers. However, senior managers usually do not have enough time to focus on the project
progress due to work pressure from multiple aspects (Al-Ahmad et al. 2009). If the projects
are not supported by senior managers, they are at risk of failure.
Project leaders need to communicate with senior managers frequently in order to obtain
valuable feedback from them. Meanwhile, criticism from senior managers need to be
accepted humbly and a favorable and harmonious relationship should be kept (Piraquive,
Crespo & Garcia 2015).
2.4. Inappropriate skills
Finally, inappropriate skills can make a project fail drastically. The rapid growth of
knowledge make it difficult for technicians to know which capabilities they need (Al-Ahmad
et al. 2009). If the project developers knows nothing about the project-related technology or it
is too difficult to learn, it is obvious that the project plan has deviated from the right track.
However, wise choice of technologies can prevent technical failures. If project managers
choose the wrong technologies and tools for the project, developers will face a dilemma. Due
to inappropriate skills, the project is difficult achieve the goal eventually.
In order to avoid the problem, technicians need to improve their learning ability and explore
new technologies actively. At the same time, the project managers need to consider the
technical level of the technical staffs and do not propose some requirements difficult to
achieve.

Project Management for IT Professionals
Assessment 2
3. Specific examples
3.1. Example I: failure of ITI project
Instructional Technology Initiative (ITI) is the teaching plan of the Los Angeles Unified
School District (LAUSD). The intended purpose of the ITI project is to provide students with
teaching equipment to promote their participation in learning (Alami 2016). LAUSD signed a
contract with Apple supplying 650,000 iPad to schools in the district in order to promote the
digital curriculum revolution through Pearson Education (Alami 2016). However, Pearson
Education is difficult to create a project to support online learning for students in 25 schools
in the district (Alami 2016). In addition, distributing and collecting iPads to all the students
every day is a tremendous challenge to most schools (Alami 2016). Due to serious technical
problems, almost all the schools stopped using online courses eventually. Because of
tremendous pressure and criticism, the principal of school district resigned eventually.
ITI project reflects that the leadership of LAUSD does consider from the perspective of the
students but they lack the expertise of project management and the skills of implementation.
The principal was also a victim of the incident. If the team of leadership had relevant project
experience or consulted professional project managers in the early stage, the probability of
success of the project will be greatly improved.
3.2. Example II: Technical border control system
In 2003, the British Home Office launched an electronic border plan to establish a technical
border control system in order to collect information of all passengers entering or leaving the
British (Alami 2016). As a project supplier, Raython System provided corresponding project
support. However, the project of Raython System was not finished on time in 2010 and the
quality of service had some problems, so the Home Office decided to terminate the contract
(Alami 2016). The quantitative standards that had not been achieved, which are the
percentage of user information collected is lower than the standard and Raython System
employed two systems to fulfill the project requirements rather than one required by the
Home Office (Alami 2016). At the same time, Raython System regarded that the Home
Office terminated the contract improperly and initiated a prosecution (Alami 2016).
Eventually, the court decided that Raython System won the case and order the Home Office
to pay 224 million dollar in compensation (Alami 2016).

Project Management for IT Professionals
Assessment 2
The e-Borders Project reflects that as a failed project, no one stakeholder can obtain benefit.
The reasons for the project failure are that the requirements of the project are unclear and the
evaluation of the stakeholders is insufficient. When the systems changed from two to one, the
project was already facing many risks. Meanwhile, Raython System did not have enough
experience about the related projects to achieve the goal of collecting the user information as
much as possible.

Project Management for IT Professionals
Assessment 2
4. Conclusion
In conclusion, IT project have certain causes that make them easy to failure. The usual causes
of failure are unclear requirements, lack of user exposure and support from senior managers
and inappropriate skills. However, there are some strategies to solve the problems. Firstly, the
requirements of the projects needs to be defined clearly. Secondly, it is important to increase
the customer participation at the first stage of the project and continually attract the customer
in the process of project. Thirdly, support from senior managers is essential for project
success. Lastly, engineers should learn the new technologies actively and the project
managers need to choose the appropriate technologies. Moreover, the examples of ITI project
and technical border control system clarify the essential causes of IT project failure.
Therefore, the project managers need to do sufficient research and risk assessment of the
reasons to avoid project failure.

Project Management for IT Professionals
Assessment 2
Reference
Al-Ahmad, W, Al-Fagih, K, Khanfar, K, Alsamara, K, Abuleil, S & Aub-Salem, H 2009, ‘A
taxonomy of an IT project failure: root causes’, International Management Review, vol. 5,
no. 1, pp. 93-106.
Alami, A 2016, ‘Why do information technology projects fail’, Procedia Computer Science,
vol. 100, pp. 62-71.
Black, D 2018, ‘Team members’ behaviors more often reason for IT project failures’, The
Enterprese, vol. 28, no. 14, p. 11.
Discenza, R & Forman, JB 2007, ‘Seven causes of project failure: how to recognize them and
how to initiate project recovery’, PMI Global Congress, Project Management Institute, North
America.
Jayaraman, K, Haron, H, Luyee, Y & R, S 2015, ‘Reasons for the failure of web-based
application of information technology projects: an empirical study in Malaysia’, Problems
and Perspectives in Management, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 277-287.
Piraquive, FND, Crespo, RG & Garcia, VHM 2015, ‘Analysis and improvement of the
management of IT projects’, Failure Cases In IT Project, vol. 13, no. 7, pp. 2366-2371.