The document discusses experts' views on large scale IT projects from McKinsey and University of Oxford. The experts found that 50% of projects massively blow budgets, 56% deliver less value, and 17% threaten the company's existence. The experts suggest focusing on managing strategy and stakeholders, securing talent, building effective teams, and using rigorous project management practices to improve outcomes. However, the document also notes realities that make applying these suggestions challenging, such as unclear objectives, low bids prioritizing cost over talent, and misaligned vendor incentives.

1. Large scale IT projects
Expert’s view – McKinsey & University of Oxford
Analysis

2. Importance
• No need to elaborate – Just look around!
• Mobility, analytics, big data have changed the rules of
business as we knew it once
• Smart businesses embracing IT

3. What the experts have to say?
McKinsey & University of Oxford about large scale IT projects:
• 50% massively blow their budgets
• 56% less value delivered
• 7% over time
• 17% threaten the existence of the company. Termed as
black swans

4. Ways to Improve
• Focusing on managing strategy and stakeholders instead of
exclusively concentrating on budget and scheduling
• Mastering technology and project content by securing
critical internal and external talent
• Building effective teams by aligning their incentives with
the overall goals of projects
• Excelling at core project-management practices, such as
short delivery cycles and rigorous quality checks

5. Reality check
Let us dig deeper and see what are the issues/pain areas with
the suggested ways to improve by the experts.
This should provide some insight to the big IT vendors (I
believe they may already be aware). This could also prove to
be helpful to companies while choosing their IT vendors.

6. Problem – 1
Focusing on managing strategy and stakeholders:
• Too many people involved at the top management to
realize that budgeting and scheduling should not be the
drivers of a large scale IT project
• Companies not choosing the right IT partners - outsourcing
execution to lowest bidding vendors who lack business
focus
• Vendors often miss out on this owing to unclear objectives
& lack of understanding of the complete picture
• Companies not treating vendors as partners in true sense

7. Problem – 2
Mastering technology and project content:
• When companies go for lowest bidding vendors as IT
partners, they do not get the best talent
• Resource burn out, lack of motivation & resulting attrition
because of long project duration and schedule & cost
overruns
• Vendors not well poised to grasp shifting requirements and
their impacts owing to not so great business focus & poor
stakeholder management

8. Problem – 3
Building effective teams:
• Incentive structures at vendors are rarely aligned to overall
project goal
• Teams do not reach optimum output owing to the lack of
skills, burn out and lack of training opportunities

9. Problem – 4
Execution issues:
• Weak stage gates – leading to rework for different teams
• Excessively high number of processes to be followed (not
required by companies but internal to vendors) resulting in
missing out on the few important ones

10. Lessons
We saw what the pain areas are and we do understand what
could be done to improve the outcome for large scale IT
projects.
Next time you want to kick off a large business transformation
project, beware of the pitfalls and do work on the ways to
improve as suggested by the experts.

11. References
http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/delivering
_large-scale_it_projects_on_time_on_budget_and_on_value