Lack of Management Commitment seriously affects project delivery in our organization
It is interesting that three quarters of the scientifically invalid sample of readers who actually responded to our survey on "IT has no respect for or understanding of customers and users" either agreed or partly agreed with the statement. This could mean one of several things:
- IT is particularly hard on IT
- Never give process geeks a "maybe" option
- IT has no respect for or understanding of customers and users
You'd like to think we would be making some progress on this one by now.
Let's try another (with a less satanic node number this time): "Lack of Management Commitment seriously affects project delivery in our organization". How do you feel about that statement?
Made in New Zealand 
Comments
Pink Elephant says not
http://blogs.pinkelephant.com/index.php?/troy/perspectives_from_the_pink...
When one surveys IT leaders, it turns out that they think that management support is not a priority.
I disagree. I think management leadership and support are key - all capabilities flow from that support and commitment.
Cary King
Minerva Enterprises
Managing Partner
www.MinervaE.com
7 Enablers / Constraints to Service Management Projects
Hello Cary
A minor qualification to your point related to my post.
The survey we distributed to over 300 participants was called the 7 Enablers and Constraints to service management. All of these 7 factors are critical to project success and I would agree that Leadership is the most important of them all. The survey participants were asked to rate each of the enablers from the least to most difficult issue they face.
What they told us in the survey was that of the seven critical success factors leadership was not an issue for most of them or at least it was the least of their worries within the scope of the survey. For the most part their leaders were behind their initiatives and backing their objectives. They were not saying leadership was not important. Only that it was not their major concern.
This result was surprising as I would have projected that leadership would have been one of their leading issues.
Troy
Demographics
The survey was given to participants at an ITIL event. How many of the participants were senior management; would they rank their own Leadership as poor? It seems that Momentum would be more of a concern for senior management than for, let's say, the process owners. In my opinion only, the process owners would likely be more interested in "real" items, such as Integrated Tools and Ability to Deploy.
7 Enablers / Constraints to Service Management Projects
The participants at the Pink Perspective roadshow were mixed but if I had to generalize those who attended I would have to say the the majority of the folks that came were the people tasked with getting things done and were accountable for the process improvement projects.
Process Owners / Managers
Program / Project Managers
ITSM Tool Owners
etc..
Troy
Do successful projects have a different perspective?
I wonder if there is a difference between the reasons why participants in a successful ITSM project think they succeeded and why those who were unsuccessful think they failed? Also, of primary importance for me, is identifying the key predictors of ITSM success or failure. I think I've got quite good at it over the years, for instance walking away from any project that doesn't recognise the true gaop between their current performance and best in breed performance - or any project that talks about centres of excellence ;-)
Survey
In 2006, I conducted structured interviews with over sixty ITSM and ITAM Program Managers of large IT Organizations (ITOs) whom I had come to know while at Peregrine Systems and CA. Mostly they were the Program Managers from the largest companies in the world - especially North America.
The compiled results showed that a significant percentage of ITOs that invested in IT Service and Asset Management were not fully satisfied with the outcomes of their investment.
The most common complaints these companies reported were that they were unable to achieve the results they expected or the time and cost of achieving the expected results were much higher than they anticipated.
A significant percentage - nearly half - of organizations deploying IT Service Management found the actual time and money spent on the implementations they called successful exceeded the original estimate by more than 50%.
The number one complaint was politics, followed closely by lack of management support. And, these individuals are pretty senior management themselves.
My personal observation from the hundreds of implementations for which I've been responsible is that ITOs seriously underestimate the effort required for human change. ITOs are excellent at implementing technology for other organizations that are undergoing change - they have far less experience with applying change efforts to themselves.
Cary King
Minerva Enterprises
Managing Partner
www.MinervaE.com