Resistance to the Right IT Project Solution
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Over lunch the other day, Barry Glasco (a colleague) and I
were reminiscing about corporate IT projects that we’d worked on as consultants
over the years. Typically, these were large systems that were either having
trouble being completed or were having serious problems once they were in
production. Barry pointed out a self-defeating pitfall or anti-pattern that we
had both seen in such cases.
The consultants, usually with the help of the employees in
the trenches, would use their time, effort, and expertise to analyze the system
under development or in production. They would arrive at a clear, supportable,
essential solution – technical, architectural, methodological, organizational,
whatever. This would be presented to upper management…whereupon upper (or
project) management would say, “No, we can’t do that.”
Sometimes, they would give no specific reason why the
solution was not acceptable. Sometimes, they made it clear that it wasn’t the
solution they wanted or that they felt was acceptable. If they did explain
their rejection, it was usually in budgetary or political terms.
The investigating team would often then go back and look for
an alternate (and less optimal) solution. If one was found, often that was
rejected as well, and so on, often down to the least desirable solution. Barry said that he and another colleague,
Chuck McCorvey, had gone through this so many times with one client that they
joked about simply presenting the worst solution first, since it seemed to be
typically the only solution the client would accept.
Note that this is not always the case; I’ve seen situations
where the client has accepted and implemented – as best they could – the ideal
solution, usually with positive results. But the opposite happens often enough
to raise the issue: why? Why does a corporation or government agency that is
investing millions, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions of dollars
into a major IT system sometimes so resistant to solving its problems?
From my own observations, it usually boils down to three
interrelated factors: internal politics; budget; and fear/pride.
IT Management 
