One of my bugbears about working in IT is the perception that our projects always run late and over budget.
How many times have we heard about projects that go two or three times over budget or that run three, six or even 12 months late?
I’ve seen so many PIRs that compare the final cost and budget to early estimates, and there is always a significant gap.
But when you dig down, the initial estimate was just that: an estimate. A “rough” figure to build a “basic” system.
An estimate for a simple product, without all the requirements, or set up costs, or implementation, or support costs, or the many other things that go into building an IT system, such as security, training, and change management to name a few.
Indeed, you may not need to consider these peripheral costs in a prototype or pilot that is never intended for the light of day.
But the problem is, that is often these simplified estimates that are quoted and passed up the chain.
Along the way, they are cemented into an organisation’s psyche as they are baked into business plans, against which the final project is eventually compared.
And we wonder why IT projects appear to “run over”. They don’t: it’s the goalposts that are incorrectly calibrated to start with!
The challenge is to change this mindset.
We need to come up with a way of presenting estimates as just that: a respresentation of a subset part of a project based on loose figures that most likely will change once we do proper planning.
And we need to do this without losing the confidence of our business peers!
