The Power of Technology Deployment: Why You Should Make Deployment A Priority

By Gina Daniel- Lee, VP, Strategic Alliances, Velociti

Too many IT projects come in late and over budget despite smart technology choices. You need appropriate scale, integrated deployment thinking, and project transparency.

Enterprises are chagrined but rarely surprised when big projects fail.

When Gartner surveyed Project Management Officers in five countries several years ago, they learned the bigger the IT project, the more likely it was to fail, reaching a high of almost 30 percent. The most frequently cited reasons? Delays and cost overruns, not the technology itself.

Given this, you’d think that IT managers and PMOs would make deployment a priority, integrated from the start into every strategic initiative. But that often fails to happen.

Instead, they spend the majority of their time choosing devices and software, dealing with resellers and integrators, and negotiating price. While these are certainly all key success factors, their contribution can be undermined by a poorly executed deployment.

In practice, resellers and their clients tend to wall off deployment as the discrete, final step in a system implementation. RFP’s go out to a group of installers, and the low bid often seems like the one that will best keep the project under budget. What can be overlooked or minimized at this point, however, is the impact on Total Cost of Ownership. An under qualified installer, or one that hasn’t been involved in the planning, can ultimately drive significant additional costs in delay and rework.

Everyone’s happy until deadlines begin to slip, change orders pour in, and it’s unclear exactly where the project stands until it’s too late. No one really owns the deployment, and it shows. Tacking on deployment at the tail end of a project is generally a mistake, and a costly one at that.

What might you do differently to lower this deployment risk?

1. Begin worrying about deployment from project inception. Whoever is going to carry the ball — your in-house facilities people, a reseller, or a dedicated deployment specialist — ensure they have a seat at the table. Solicit their input. Get their recommendations about componentry, logistical challenges, and scheduling issues. After all, they’re going to be on the firing line once the rollout begins, and they’ve undoubtedly had a front-row seat for prior projects. At this stage, disagreements about the best way to implement a technology are healthy and helpful. Later, they may just degenerate into finger pointing.
2. Start with scale. Remember that the risk of failure increases with project size. An ambitious scope is fine, but break the project into smaller pieces with nearer deadlines, ideally no more than six months out. It’s also easier to get technology buy-in from a limited group, and then leverage early success as a way to sell the project to subsequent units.
3. Once the actual rollout is underway, treat it as a true project, not as a standard job order. Insist on top-down visibility into schedules, logistics, install locations, and all key personnel. Get frequent, even real-time updates. While this won’t guarantee a flawless implementation — stuff happens — you’ll be in a position to adjust resources as needed and nip problems before they snowball and jeopardize the larger timetable.

If you take this approach, initially it may appear that you’re going to spend more. But this is definitely a “penny-wise, pound-foolish” situation. Over the life of the deployment, you’re almost certain to save money because the project will cross the finish line on time. Even more important from a corporate perspective, you’ll mitigate the risks of technology rejection, organizational disruption — and unhappy stakeholders.

Whatever the reason, many enterprises have a blind spot when it comes to technology deployment, which is both more complex and more critical-path than it first appears. Now you know there are straightforward ways to beat the odds and complete your implementation successfully.