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How to Successfully Execute IT Projects Without Fail -- from the September 9th issue of CRN.

Today's IT solution providers are under many of the same constraints as their customers: Do more with less, deliver on-time, offer competitive pricing. Its easy to get lost in the details, but losing site of the big picture can cost VARs customers and money. Here, the CEO of Journyx, a project management software company, shares best practices of project management. — Jennifer Bosavage, editor

More than 30 percent of IT projects fail because they are either substantially late or exceeded their prescribed budgets, according to research from Gartner. That is an intimidating figure, especially as it coincided with our country slipping into its worst recession in decades. Now, as our economy struggles to improve, we should attempt to learn from our cash-strapped experiences and improve the ways in which we manage our project work.

In today's knowledge-worker economy, IT solution providers need to devote their energies to tracking resources against project performance. It's not enough to measure physical input vs. output to calculate ROI. Companies analyze the use of human resources against target schedule, cost, and quality. Only through careful analysis and reporting can an organization develop a comprehensive understanding of:

• Who is working on which project?
• How can we get a project back on schedule?
• How much more work is required?
• What is the real ROI for each project?

Areas of Failure in IT Projects

Resource Management

Finding the right person to put on each job can be challenging for many organizations, yet it is essential for successfully completing projects and maximizing human resource effectiveness. IT work should not merely be categorized by skill type or job functions, but also by the availability and capability of your team members in specific work scenarios. Understanding who you have to call upon and when they are available is crucial for getting the project done on time and within budget. An inability to see and quickly understand resource allocation – especially during moments of crisis – dramatically increases the risk of failure.

Executive Decision-Making

Projects rarely succeed without executive support, yet it's uncommon for executives to have easy access to the right real-time project information. Most often, executives make do with simple percentage-complete or other high-level “health check” statistics, but those do not add sufficient value in the decision-making process if the lower-level details are not correct and timely. An executive dashboard is only as good as the information that generates it. All too often, the data feeding these dashboards is inaccurate.

Project Management

Project managers are responsible for keeping projects on track, but how can they do this without an adequate system in place to help monitor progress and schedules? Without effective processes, project managers will tread on the toes of their team members in order to get status reports and project information. Good leadership requires easy access to information and simple communication, but too rarely are these present in project scenarios.

Read the rest of this article at CRN!

This Forbes article, written by Joe McKendrick, explores how cloud computing enables cost savings, fosters greater agility and more. Read on to find out the ways cloud computing is altering our business landscape.

Economists and pundits have long feared the emergence of what they called “hollow corporations,” or businesses that don’t actually produce actual goods or services themselves, but instead act as brokers or intermediaries relying on networks of suppliers and partners. But now, thanks to technology, successful businesses surprisingly are often brokers of services, delivered via technology, from providers and on to consumers.

Where are these services coming from? Look to the cloud.

Yes, cloud computing enables cost savings — as companies can access technology and applications on-demand on an as-needed basis and pay for only what they use. And yes, this fosters greater agility, with less reliance on legacy IT assets. But the changes go even deeper that that. Consider the ways cloud computing is altering our business landscape:

“Loosely coupled” corporations: I don’t think anyone should fear that our corporations are becoming “hollow.” Rather, “loosely coupled corporations” may be a better way to describe what is happening. The term “loosely coupled” came into vogue with service-oriented architecture a few years ago, meaning an entity or system stands fine on its own, but when linked to other like systems, the magic happens. Cloud computing is paving the way for the loosely coupled company – which may be an entity that exists purely as an aggregation of third-party services, provided on an on-demand basis to meet customer demands. Most of these services will be passed through as cloud services, both from within the enterprise and from outside.

Blurring of IT consumers and providers: In the IT world, the divide has been very clear cut: there were the vendors who provided technology products and services, and there were customers that purchased and used them. Cloud computing is blurring these distinctions. There’s nothing stopping companies that are adept at building and supporting their own private clouds from offering these services to partners and customers beyond the firewall. In fact, many already do. Amazon was an online retailer that began to offer its excess capacity to outside companies. Even non-IT companies are becoming cloud providers. Cloud computing may finally mean a way for IT to finally become a profit center.

Startups on a dime: Let’s face it, there’s no point in investing $50,000 or more in servers and software when everything you need is right in the cloud. I like the story of GigaVox, a podcasting provider, that launched off of Amazon Web Services a few years back. Their startup IT costs? About $80 a month, for everything from storage to back-end processing. As Chris Sacca, a software startup investor and former Google executive, put it: “The biggest line item in [software startup] companies now is rent and food… A decade ago, I don’t think you could write a line of code for less than $1 million.” As we ponder unemployment and underemployment in our economy, the availability of cheap cloud computing may be laying the groundwork for a startup boom, the likes we have never seen before. This applies to departments of larger organizations as well, by the way. Designing new products, without the need to go through corporate finance and IT approvals definitely is a great way to instill entrepreneurial spirit.

Read the full article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2011/09/19/cloud-computing-may...