One Enterprise IT Project Checklist Every Virtual Team Needs Right Now!

Covid-19 is rattling nerves, up-ending lives and sparking a huge expansion of the virtual workplace. For those contemplating or in the midst of sponsoring enterprise IT projects this is going to significantly expand the communication and execution challenges standing in the way of your success.

What is already hard is about to get harder. The traditional, face-to-face methods for setting objectives, managing work and steering a course towards those objectives will no longer be consistently available.

Some in the tech community will dismiss these concerns. They will argue that the virtual workplace is nothing new. They’ve been doing it — at least part-time — for years; they have the drill down cold.

Maybe, but I’d caution against taking undue comfort from that experience. The dynamics of full-time, completely virtual teams are far more complex than part-time, partially virtual teams. In the latter, workers tend to isolate after issues have been discussed and objectives set in person. And when it comes to having the act down cold, well, let’s just say the data doesn’t support that conclusion.

The research is consistent — 70% of enterprise IT projects, and 95% of those projects in excess of one million dollars, fail. Two-thirds of those failures happen for one reason. It’s not the tech. It’s not the team. It’s because what the business needs to do is never fully communicated — therefore, it’s never fully understood.

I think this is happening because we’re mistaking what these projects actually represent. We talk about running IT projects, but that’s not what we’re doing. We’re running business projects that happen to be enabled by IT. Technology is only a tool — nothing more. Tech marketeers often sell it as magic; it isn’t.

This misunderstanding has resulted in two problems. Business-people have become complacent — they assume too much and are not telling the technologists everything they need to know. Technologists, on the other hand, aren’t asking the right questions to solicit critical details from the business. Neither party does this consciously, but that doesn’t change the result.

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