The end of IT projects

So another piece of Green Field thinking for you (remember: it’s not necessarily what you should do – just what could you do if you weren’t constrained by legacy)… do we need IT Projects any more?

There are two threads to this: firstly that in a world of commoditized services, the need for IT infrastructure projects will diminish in organisations other than those that provide commodity IT as a service to others; and secondly in a world of perpetual software enhancement, the management of applications and services becomes operational rather than project-centric.

On the first point, this isn’t to say that organisations will no longer need to run projects. It’s just that as the need for organisations to “do their own plumbing” subsides, the focus of business change projects can become absolutely on the business change, rather than what we still too often see today which are “IT projects” with a sliver of “communications” tacked on to them to give lip service to the needs to change cultures, behaviours, structures and capabilities that are the hard work associated with changing a business. IT truly becomes an enabler, rather than an end to itself, when the deployment of systems and services doesn’t require complex engineering to establish software and hardware infrastructure.

On the second point, as we witness the constant incremental changes that mark the way in which many consumer web services are delivered (as an aside, there was a wonderful tweet recently comparing disquiet to changes on Facebook’s home page to disquiet when supermarkets shift their aisles around), constant iterative enhancement of software becomes more of an operational rather than project activity.

So: no more IT projects; business change projects that have IT as a work stream, and constant incremental changes to software in a operational model once the big business change projects have been implemented…