Being good at defining your needs towards vendors and data suppliers will save you money; I say this with the certainty of someone who have worked for and with Large Cap companies from various industries, and seen what works and not. Being too nonchalant or happy go lucky with data oriented projects will lead to expensive and often botched projects. Gartner set the failure rate of data related projects to 85%, and I remember this figure being 80% during my student years at KTH; things haven’t changed for the better.
So how do you go about being one of the successful 15%? You need these key factors in your project:
- Someone near decision makers or project initiators who have a deep understanding of what it is you want to achieve; I have seen too many projects that have been too loosely defined, and let by people with little to no competence with software development and operations or data architecture.
- Be prepared that the success of your project hinges on change management more than the chosen solution. Software development is rather easy and straightforward, changing a colossal organization is not
- Bottom up is better than top bottom. Management mandates changes with zero insight into the operative realities of those having to live with project implementation will lead to those implementations not being enforced. “Board room creations” and pretty PowerPoint get eaten alive by the reality of daily operative life. You need to do a proper current situation analysis and involve all stakeholders affected by your changes and get them onboard, or change them (I said what I said, if your employees do not want to play ball, you have the choice of helping them change with you or replace them).
- Set road maps with deadlines that you keep no matter what. Delays are the start of failure; there is rarely a need to not reach a deadline unless it was badly set, which in case you need to work on your project management skills.
- Be open to Pivot; I rather work agile than Waterfall based any day. The goal and milestones you set at the onset of a project rarely hold all the way through, and you need to pivot at least once
I have a lot to say about digital transformation (which by the way is the title of an Udemy course I created a few years back), “data related” projects and so one and the above is a short but sweet summary. If you have any questions or want to know more, get in touch.
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