How do you know if your project is successful? How would you describe this success to your kids or parents? What differentiated your work from that of your predecessor? How will the history books describe the legacy that you’ve left behind? These are some of my favourite questions that I ask in job interviews. I’ve found that these questions are deceivingly difficult for many to answer. I’ve also asked these questions to organizations on both the delivery side and the receiving side of large IT projects. “On time and on budget” simply doesn’t cut it as an answer.
What stands out in my mind are those answers that are based on measurable results and not some squishy terminology. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the fact that many outcomes are qualitative. But saying that you were responsible for a particular domain or contributed to a particular effort gives no sense of how noteworthy the effort was. Consider the following statement “I participated in the Vancouver Olympic effort”. Unfairly ambiguous? Perhaps. But it helps demonstrate the point that it is difficult to make a decision without more concrete evidence.
Evidence based decision making, a sort of technology CSI, helps link technology projects to business outcomes which ultimately gets the attention of an organization’s senior leaders. In an era of shrinking budgets and the occasional scepticism towards technology initiatives it becomes more important than ever before to build the evidence of concrete business outcomes. Evidence helps us appreciate if we are accomplishing the business objective that we set out to and allows us make course corrections when the evidence show us otherwise. Evidence therefore allows for informed risk taking. While evidence alone won’t guarantee 100% project success, it will improve the odds dramatically. It will also allow for earlier identification of those activities that should simply be stopped. With the appropriate evidence, those efforts that have been stopped, cancelled, discontinued, etc. will not be deemed as failures but rather stepping stones towards the next success. Evidence helps everyone understand what has happened, helps us safeguard against the reoccurrence of those things that stood in the way of full success. I say “full success” in place of “failure” since we will have learned from the efforts the led up to the decision point and will be able to build from them going forward. Of course even with all the evidence in the world, doing the exact same thing twice and not being successful is just wrong.
So as you build out that project plan or consider your objectives for your upcoming year, take a moment to consider how you can prove your success to others. You’ll be glad you took the time to think about the evidence you’re going to need to convince others of how really great your work was.
