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Naked & Afraid IT Projects

In the hit reality TV show Naked and Afraid a man and woman who have never met in their lives before are taken to a remote and dangerous location, the jungles of Borneo, or the rain forest of the Amazon. Once there they strip off all their clothes and head off, barefoot together into the jungle with just a machete to survive for 21 days. They need to find fresh water and food, build a shelter and fire, and protect themselves from poisonous snakes and wild animals to survive. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

Fortunately, nearby to these two hapless victims is a highly trained and well-equipped production team to make make sure the survivors don’t actually die on screen (this would be bad for ratings). Typically, by day 4 of this expedition the intrepid man and woman are starving, dehydrated, covered from head to toe (and elsewhere) in bug bites, cold, and extremely miserable. So it’s unsurprising that most of the time one or both of the people drop out early and that even those that survive to the end of the 21 days end up severely malnourished and in need of medical help for the physical and mental health issues they have sustained along the way.

To listen to many service providers (system integrators, agencies, and consultants) talk about their experiences trying to work with in-house client project teams, Naked & Afraid can seem strangely analogous.  Think of it this way: a service provider sends a crack team to their new customer’s site to embark on an ambitious, lucrative, and complex digital transformation project. The service provider’s team contains folks that have the requisite project, change management, creative and deep dive technical skills needed to get the job done.  The customer themselves also provides a team to work together with them on the project, but this team consists of employees who have never worked on a similar project, have few relevant skills and may only be there because they thought it would be an interesting learning experience. In some cases, the employee is on the team because the firm could not think what else to do with them. I mean what could possibly go wrong?

Well, here are a few examples I gathered in just the past couple of weeks alone of what exactly does go wrong:

  • A 6-month project that is now 9 months late.
  • An infrastructure system upgrade that is in its 20th month
  • An in-house IT team that steadfastly refuses to use outside help is now selecting its 4th content management system in 6 years because, allegedly, the previous 3 didn’t work…

Though I have no doubt at all that there are a wide range of other reasons why these projects are so tragically failing, in each case the service provider working on these projects told me that the client’s project team is a major factor. That the client team simply does not have the skills or, oftentimes, even the internal authority to help make the project a success.

It’s so common a complaint that one of the major consulting firms has a tongue-in-cheek phrase they use internally to describe these situations: “You know they are nice guys, but…”

Selecting the right service provider to work on your project is critical, often more so than the selection of the associated technology. But you — the customer and the buyer — are not off the hook as project success factors are a combination of people, process, and technology. Your people and your processes are as essential to the success of any project as are the external service provider and the technology you selected.

Your team does not need to have the same skills as the service provider, but they do minimally need to have the skills and the authority to effectively co-manage both the project itself and the related business and process changes that will result internally. If they don’t, you need to get them via training for existing employees or by bringing in new staff prior to the project kickoff. To be clear, there is no shame at all in putting employees onto the project team to learn new skills to further their careers, but you do need to be open with the service provider about what skills they really have, as well the skills and experience they hope to obtain.

The bottom line is that you can’t bluff it in the jungle, and even if you try, those with real survival skills will see through you in an instant. For sure, some service providers will take advantage of their greater knowledge and skillsets to intimidate or otherwise manipulate clients. Some service providers, particularly the larger consultancies, are adept at placing unskilled junior consultants on projects at high daily rates on the assumption you won’t know the difference. But the vast majority of the time, service providers are honest, and they want the job done on time, done well, and to keep you the customer happy. But they need help via a willing and able customer project team. Sadly, today all too often project team relationships turn sour, and the project itself gets messy due to the simple fact that the customer assigned a team that was completely unprepared for the difficult journey/ordeal ahead.

 


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