DIY projects
September 29, 2007 – 11:03 pmThere’s been a lot of buzz in the last year about Do-it-yourself IT folks. Business people bringing their own bits and pieces of IT functions into the workplace, circumventing the traditional IT department. CIO magazine even did a big article on it (a copy of the article made the rounds around our business departments, in fact). While organizations are starting to address this issue, I see a bigger one brewing: DIY projects.
There are business units at companies all over the world right now circumventing their Project Management Offices and/or Project Managers. Sometimes they just form projects within their departments and try to do it themselves; other times it’s more radical. I have actually been involved as a vendor to a Fortune 100 where a business unit cut IT out of a million-dollar software project by outsourcing the bulk of the work to us and hiring us to manage it. This wasn’t done as outsourcing, per se- just a complete and outright circumvention of IT. The reasons given behind the scenes were that IT’s standards were too strict and that IT took too long.
Given the number of projects out there that overrun budgets and/or timelines, the idea of business units cutting out the Project Management Office, IT, or any other subject matter experts within your company are frightening. Even if the project succeeds, consider that the vast majority of projects require maintenance and management once they ‘go live’. This will either be done by the very staff that was cut out of the original project (if the business unit turns to IT), by business team folks whose jobs are actually to be doing something else (if the business unit tries to run it themselves), or by the vendor (thus setting you up with a permanent dependency on the vendor- your business unit did know to check out the vendor’s long-term viability, right?).
This kind of thing is just trouble in so many ways its not funny for any business out there. Usually this sort of thing going on in your organization is a result of some problems you haven’t been paying attention to (which I have written on before). The question is, how do you quell these things? I recommend addressing your problems leading to this practice, for one, and providing strong vision and leadership can help as well. Vision and leadership will inspire trust, and a lack of trust in the status quo that others can meet the business unit’s needs is always what leads to these sort of rogue ops.
Still, I’d love to hear what other folks thoughts on this. Any comments? Can anyone comment on how their organizations are handling this problem?
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