Steer clear of IT project failure: External project oversight

With a multi-million-pound IT project, the cost of project failure is huge. That’s why it’s important to have the right structure in place to ensure the project runs smoothly, delivers on all project requirements and delivers value for money.

Which senior member of staff leads on your ICT projects?

Commonly, the role of overseeing an IT project is placed in the hands of a Finance Director because of their excellent skills in managing budgets, analysing data, and determining potential risks.

The biggest problem with this is that managing an IT project requires unique skills and poses different risks to other business projects. While they are good at managing people and budgets, a professional with little knowledge or experience of IT can’t dig deep enough into the technical aspects of the project or have the confidence to challenge their technical teams or suppliers.

What Is External Project Governance?

The cost of project failure is huge when spending hundreds of thousands (or millions) of pounds on an IT project. When a business hands the oversight of the project to an internal, non-technical director who may lack the required expertise, the likelihood of project failure increases significantly.

Project failure can mean a manner of things, such as, the project running over time, the end solution not meeting all the requirements, or scope creep.

External project governance is an insurance policy that pays for itself. It supplements your existing director team with hard-to-find IT expertise, lowering the risk of project failure.

Companies turn to us for external IT project oversight because we have experts in multiple areas such as data migration, development, cyber security, system integration, functional and non-functional software testing, and more.

What We Do

PSP has worked on hundreds of IT projects over the past 15 years, meaning we’ve dealt with all the major pitfalls to avoid project failure and keep projects on track.

We analyse three key areas: your people, board, and suppliers.

From this, we can quickly identify the areas where your project falls short and where the project is most likely to fail.

Review Your People

• Is your team properly structured?
• Do they cover all the key areas?
• Are there any gaps in skills or capabilities?
• Are you addressing gaps correctly?
• Are risks properly assessed and challenged?
• Are your performance metrics correctly defined and measured?

Support Your Board

• Is your board competent in technology?
• Has your board set up adequate reporting metrics for the project?
• How does the board make decisions related to IT projects?
• Is there effective risk management in place?

Review Your Suppliers

• Is your supplier focused?
• Are they fulfilling all their responsibilities?
• Have the key owners been established, and how do they collaborate with the business?
• Are they adequately assessed for competence and reliability?
• How well does your supplier communicate with your business?
• How do you monitor supplier performance?

What Does External Project Governance Achieve?

1. It gives your board confidence that the project runs within budget and within time.
2. Gives your management confidence that your team is well-structured and the project is well-defined.
3. Holds your suppliers to account and ensures value for money from your IT spending.

Full Project Confidence

Outsourced IT Project Governance reassures you that your team, suppliers and board have the confidence and strategy to deliver a successful project:

Team

Our project governance team will ensure your team has the right knowledge and skills to cover all aspects of the IT project. This will give your project management team confidence in their team’s ability to meet the project requirements and deadlines.

One major risk factor in managing an internal project team is a turnover of staff – when key members of the team leave, there is a complicated handover process, and not all the important information is passed over. With an external governance provider, like PSP, there is consistency. We stay with your project from start to finish and thoroughly document all project information and updates to ensure knowledge is properly shared amongst our project teams. We also have at least two project governance experts trained and updated on your project – meaning there will always be someone with full knowledge of your project, regardless of sickness or change in staff.

Board

Does your board ask the right questions? Does your board understand enough about technology? If you and your team of directors are about to sign off on a large IT project, external project governance will go a long way in boosting the board’s confidence.

That’s because our independent oversight will provide your board with transparency, assurance, validation, and accountability throughout the project.

Your internal directors are successful at growing a business, managing budgets, and overseeing budgets, however, managing an IT project requires a completely different set of skills.

Knowing that your technology partner has asked all the right questions and analyses every part of the project to ensure cost-effectiveness, will assure you that your project is in good hands and will be successfully implemented within the agreed timeframe and budget.

Suppliers

Effective governance and reviews of your technology supplier is essential for success. Not just the success of the final solution, but also your partnership with the vendor. 

By working with your suppliers, we can align your overall IT spending with your overall business’s goals, helping you and your suppliers understand their responsibilities, face consequences for non-compliance and contribute to the overall project success.

We’ll ensure your suppliers deliver as they should, meet SLAs and give you real value for money. As an independent, unbiased partner, we’re not afraid to hold your suppliers to account if we discover shortfalls in their service, non-compliance, or inability to handle risks.

PSP IT: Driving Digital Innovation

PSP is a technology partner specialising in cost-effective strategic IT services. Our agile IT outsourcing allows you to bring in an experienced senior-level IT expert on a flexible basis that works for your business, saving considerable money on full-time overheads.

Whether you need a professional multiple days a week, or even once every quarter, we can provide your business with director-level IT expertise tailored to your project or business needs.

To find out more about External Project Governance, talk to our team today.