7 signs business stakeholders will sink your IT project

6. Pursuing other options

I once was assigned to a project where users and IT were working on a system, but the users had already soured it. What the users did was budget their own dollars to purchase a commercial system that wasn’t as robust as the internal system being developed, but that was easier to use.

IT should have stopped the internal project then, but leadership didn’t know the users had gone on to another system. Instead, the users continued to give feedback on the internal system, although not with regularity, and the project continued, redundant and effectively dead.

In an ideal situation, the CIO should have maintained close contact with user management so IT would have been alerted immediately of the move to a commercial system. Further work on the internal system could have been stopped, and IT could have moved on.