Project drift: How to deal with IT’s silent project killer

Always renegotiate

Renegotiating project timelines and deliverables goes hand in hand with having that early meeting with stakeholders about project enhancements, because taking on significant new enhancements will lengthen project timelines and will contribute to budget overruns.

Business managers know this, but they also want to get as much functionality from a project as they can. What they do then is have their staff “trial run” a project and provide feedback like, “This is nice, but I’d really like to see this, too,” or, “No, we can’t use this. We need to also build an interface to system XYZ.”

These requests often come when IT is expecting feedback primarily on minor system bugs that need to be resolved, but business users don’t always see it that way. Instead, they view QA as a “systems acceptance” test — i.e., will they accept the project as is, or is it insufficient for their needs?