Read the article below, and think about what they are saying from a \"business\"

Question

Read the article below, and think about what they are saying from a "business" goals. Do you think the article is talking about requirement goals or something different? Write a 2 - 3 paragraph summary.

More than half of IT projects still failing

An annual survey from project management company Innotas shows that more than half of IT projects fail, three years after a similar survey showed nearly identical findings.

In 2013, a survey from cloud portfolio management provider Innotas revealed that 50 percent of businesses surveyed had experienced an IT project failure within the previous 12 months. Now, three years later, not much has changed. According to the most recent Innotas annual Project and Portfolio Management Survey, in fact, the numbers have increased: 55 percent of the 126 IT professionals surveyed between January and March 2015 reported they had a project fail, up from 32 percent in 2014.

The problem isn't necessarily that there's a shortage of project managers or technology tools to help organizations address these issues, says Tushar Patel, senior vice president of marketing, Innotas. It's a problem with resource allocation and aligning those resources with business goals.

Road trip

"I have an analogy I use all the time. Imagine you're taking a road trip. You have 10 hours, and you can only make three stops along the way. When you arrive, you see that you've made the trip in eight hours, and you've only stopped twice. That's fantastic! Except you're in Los Angeles, and you needed to get to Seattle. That's the situation businesses get into all the time -- they look at cost and process without looking at the outcome and whether or not there's any business value in these projects. They can't see the forest for the trees," Patel says.

This is a problem with aligning project outcomes with business goals and in deriving business value from IT projects. Fifty-four percent of respondents say one of their top challenges is that IT projects aren't aligned with business goals; only 31 percent of respondents say they're focused on delivering business value. Instead, 50 percent say they're mainly focused on delivering projects on-time and on-budget.

Prioritize

"Fixing this requires a focus on prioritization internally. The conversation starts with the head of the project management office, the CIO and the COO to determine first the parameters you use to determine which projects are most important, and then figure out how to execute on those," Patel says.

Business leaders also need to leverage technology to increase visibility across the entire company and all projects they have in progress, Patel says. If everyone in the company understands which projects are a priority and why that's so, then they can allocate resources, personnel and energy accordingly within the constraints of budget and staffing.

Of course, having more project management professionals on staff doesn't hurt; demand for IT professionals with those skills doesn't seem to be abating, Patel says. But more importantly, businesses need to align their projects and priorities with the larger business strategy if they want to reduce the number of project failures.

"To use the road trip example again, most people get in the car and start driving and they just trust that the resources, the map and the direction are already taken care of. You have to address those issues before you even set out on the road -- that's the same thing we're seeing, here," he says.

Explanation / Answer

The article is very much true to some extent and this is the scenario in various organizations who look after the IT unit themselves because in today's world of doing business, you cannot afford to take such risks because in the long run this may not help the organization to a great exetent and cause failure as well which is what is observed in this context where almost half of the IT projects fail and not because there is lack of mangament skills or technology exposure, but there are various issues like planning the project and resource allocation, forcasting and aligning the outcome as well.

If we look at the issue we will observe that the issue is not regarding requirement goals, rather they are regarding what organizations need to understand is that the requirements and outcome needs to strike a balance and the project that is being executed needs to add business value to the organization. Mere execution of projects may actually not help the orgabuzation flourish to a great extent as well. I believe that this is the challenge that irganizationnis need to look after so that they do not invest time and effort in something that is not at all fruitful.

Organizations today have very less chance of error because the level of competition is very high and organizations cannot afford to take this risk as that will impact the process of doing business, therefore they need to set and define their priorities right so that they do not lose out a lot on time, effort and reputation.

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