IT Projects: The Consultant’s Perspective
Installing a new IT system and delivering the requisite functionalities and compatibilities constitute a demanding consultancy project. However, the degree of difficulty faced by the consultant when handling a project of this sort often depends on the degree of the sophistication of the clients’ extant IT, the competency and attitude of the client’s IT team, the extractability of the legacy system, and the client’s hard and soft requirements.
Generally, an IT-overhaul project is highly technical so will require specialist consultancy resources and fairly intense and frequent onsite interaction with the client’s IT team and all relevant vendors, especially if the client’s business has a particularly heavy reliance on a particular application, such as an ERP package. If the business is critically reliant on an IT service that will be affected by the project, then the scope for error and tolerance for downtime will be zero. A total redundancy, parallel running system must be in operation before a full switch can be acheived.
A common problem with this kind of project concerns the client’s clarity around objectives, budget, and timescales. Again, the suitability and feasibility of all these are very dependent on the nature of the client’s requirements. Hence, in the early discussion stages, the consultant must take great care to establish with extreme specificity and certainty what it is that the client aims to achieve by the project – not just what the client says they want. Outcomes and modes of achievement maybe conflated in the client’s understanding. Separating these is an important preliminary task for the consultant.
If management are not tech savvy, it might be the case that an overly generous budget or enthusiastic IT team is driving unnecessary, excessive, or poorly defined change. The client’s business requirements and strategy should be clearly articulated, understood, and confirmed with the client before any proposal for a far-reaching IT solution is actioned. That way, the solution serves the strategy and the project is logically premised and make business sense.
Deliverables and timelines can then be defined with higher confidence, making the project easier to manage, its outputs fit-for-purpose, and more likely to conclude on-time and within-budget.