Debacle Prevention

Here’s a daunting question: 

Why do most technology projects end up as complete debacles?

It never starts out that way. A highly qualified expert firm or consultant is brought in. Staff and leadership get seated around the table. Budgets are allocated. Optimistic kickoff meetings are held, with reassuring powerpoints and timeline charts. Months of meetings are scheduled. Projects are managed.

Yet somehow, reliably, the result is disappointing if not disastrous. And it’s usually a catastrophic waste of time and money. Whether it’s an outright debacle or a mishmash of partial victories, it’s a tragic missed opportunity to harness the game-changing potential that was envisioned in the first place. 

This just isn’t right. You’re doing mission-oriented, heroic work. Technology should be supercharging you, not pulling you backwards.

So how can this be prevented? 

The answer is simple but profound. It’s about consistent, detailed, strategic ownership and leadership, inside the organization’s walls. That is the business of debacle prevention. 

And what does ownership really mean? It means someone who is paying attention to every single detail. Who is constantly making strategic and tactical adjustments. Who is seeing the project through from all angles, all day, every day. 

It means having access to, communication with, and mutual respect from leadership and staff around the organization. It means knowing what to outsource and what to insource. It means constantly prioritizing and re-prioritizing based on the most updated landscape. It’s knowing which deadlines are real, and when it makes sense to extend timeline or cost restrictions in exchange for a game-saving fix or a game-changing upgrade.

That kind of internal ownership and leadership is the real gamechanger. You can have the best external consultants in the world, and they won’t deliver on your project’s potential if no one at your organization is playing close, daily attention. How could an external firm ever possibly fill that role? 

You, as an organization, must have or develop people -- thoughtful, skillful people -- who are empowered to understand and guide the direction of development, and whose role it is to guide these processes persistently and patiently until they are completely landed. With massive amounts of flexibility, humility, and caring. 

It’s a serious endeavor and there’s no quick fix, but it is most certainly possible. It takes time, money, care, and a steadfast commitment to an entirely new way of doing things. One that refuses to accept further debacles as a given, or even an option.

Continuous Investment and Smiley Faces

An organization decides it’s time for a new website. All of the stakeholders get involved, bring in a skilled external firm, and together they figure out the strategy, content, messaging, and style.

The site then launches to great fanfare, and everyone loves it. On day one it’s the bold new face of the organization.

But if you check back in one year later, the grumbling has started. By Year 3, everyone talks about how terrible the website is. And by Year 5 it’s universally considered a complete embarrassment. So it is torn down and rebuilt from scratch. 

And the cycle repeats itself.

The same could be said for almost any digital product. In fact, it's a cycle we’ve all gotten so accustomed to, it can be hard to remember how broken it is. 

We got to wondering why this kept happening. Why, in Year 3 or 5, did everyone hate the exact same website that they loved on day one? Why did everyone’s opinion change when nothing about the site had changed?

Of course, that's the very problem. Five years after it launched, nothing about the site had changed.

Meanwhile the entire world had changed around it. The organization changed and their needs for a website had changed. Website styles had changed, so a five year old ago site looked hopelessly dated. The technology underneath it had changed, from platforms to security and speed. The expectations of users and accepted standards of the internet had changed. 

And all the while the site was stuck in the ancient world it was created in, even just five years ago.

Consider what an atrociously bad return on investment this is, for something as essential in this day and age as your website. Notice how briefly you’re in the green smiley face zone. In other words, despite all of the money and effort spent, your site is delivering on its potential for a miniscule amount of its lifecycle. 

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By contrast, what does a product-centered, ongoing-investment approach look like? 

Well, you still have to spend the time and money to build a site in the first place. But importantly, that becomes the starting line rather than the finish line. Once the product is built you continue paying attention and investing on an ongoing basis. You admit that the site needs to continue to evolve in order to stay relevant, useful, and effective. But with that cycle of continuous investment, you manage to keep everything in strong working order.

Behold the profusion of green smiley faces.

Yes, that cycle goes on forever. And yes, it costs money. But look at the comparative return on investment. You are devoting the focus and resources required for the product to deliver on its promise, to be effective for your staff, your constituency, and for delivering on your mission.

And what could possibly be a better investment than that.
 

Building Rocketships

If you’re harnessing the opportunities that technology truly offers, it's not just about barely surviving. It's about raising your game to new levels where your technology starts to enable your organization to transform itself on a regular basis. 

Your staff is spotting efficiencies, grasping unseen opportunities, testing new ideas, optimizing, experimenting, and learning. That’s the real north star. That is when your organization’s technology is no longer about trying to fix leaky pipes. 

When you build a culture of smart technology, you’re building your organization a rocketship.

Once you’ve seen this potential, you realize there are corners you should never cut.

What’s the purpose of a rocketship? To get you somewhere ambitious, to carry out your mission, and to come back alive. That’s true of your organization, too, isn’t it?

You don’t need gold plated gear shifters, you don’t need Corinthian leather seats, but you do need a thoughtfully architected, exactingly built ship, and every piece of essential functionality tested by highly capable staff for a thousand different conditions. 

If your systems and technology are really unimportant enough that you plan to outsource the whole thing, barely pay attention, cut budgets, limit staff time, or rush things that deserve careful attention, you might need to consider getting out of the space travel business. You won’t be able to compete. Maybe look into building a go-kart instead.

Otherwise, if you're looking to travel to grasp the unlimited opportunities of technology space travel, you need to invest seriously in the effort, and to pay serious attention at every step along the way. Be smart about your investments and leave those corners intact.

You Can't Delegate Caring

You’re an organizational leader. The demands are on you are high and the pace is fast. You simply must delegate things in order to survive, and for everything to get accomplished.

But one thing you cannot delegate is caring about your technology. Your organization, all the way to the top, has to care. It’s simply not good enough to say “I don’t really get technology, but you guys go ahead and take care of it.”

Why? Because your tuning out causes a ripple effect down through the organization that ultimately drains essential focus and resources from where it needs to be. Maintaining strong and high-quality technology is a detailed, never-ending process that demands constant vigilance and thoughtfulness, not to mention time and resources. If you communicate that you care about other priorities more, your organization will act accordingly.

But your technology has a fundamental, critical impact on your success. It’s what’s going to let your staff work faster and smarter. It’s going to offer you data on what’s working well and where improvements are needed. It’s going to be your arsenal for smart ways to engage your public. 

It’s your job to understand the strategy and knowledgeably help guide the possibilities. You need to understand the nature of your platforms enough to know -- at least on a high level -- what’s easy, what’s possible, what’s expensive, and what isn’t really viable right now. You simply have to understand where it stands and where it’s capable of going. You must care about it. 

You wouldn’t tune out when it comes to raising money, to strategic planning, to how your program is run, to selecting your board, to developing marketing campaigns, or to revising your branding and messaging. Of course not. Those things are too essential! 

If you stop to think about it, hopefully it becomes equally obvious that your technology is too essential to ignore as well. 

Organizations take on the character and priorities of their leadership. If you want your organization to care about technology in a detailed, robust enough way to be great at it, that level of caring starts at the top, and cannot be delegated.