Over the years, IT projects have on balance created more bad press than good. IT project failures are perhaps too numerous to mention and the Standish Group ‘Chaos Report’ of 2004 is renowned for quoting a staggering 70 per cent failure rate of projects. Yet, have things finally improved, could we start to see more IT projects delivering consistently successful results?

A new survey carried out by Analyst Ovum has revealed the IT initiatives that are increasingly leading to the success of IT projects. In a recent summit, they defined ‘highly effective IT organisations’ as those who fulfilled changing business requirements on time and without disrupting business productivity. Around 22% of the 300 companies surveyed met the criteria.

“These highly effective organizations have laid a lot of groundwork over the last couple of years by implementing virtualization, SOA and ITIL," says Mary Johnston Turner who produced the study. “They are well positioned to take advantage of the soon-to-be-released ITIL V3 recommendations that aim to more closely integrate software development, release, and operations processes. They are also in the best position to take advantage of emerging collaboration and enterprise social software solutions. The other 78% of organizations need to rapidly develop both infrastructure and operations roadmap to achieve these same levels of effectiveness if they are going to stay competitive in the coming years," she adds.

Much more can be done to turn the tide of IT project failure rates and deliver more successful IT projects and initiatives. Halian is helping numerous large enterprises to preserve, maintain and effectively manage their infrastructure and have delivered a wide range of successful IT Projects for our clients. Our people are ITIL and Prince2 accredited, we offer professional services and managed services; as well as delivering specific migration, application integration and virtualization projects.

Halian are a Sun Microsystems partner of choice, particularly for our Managed Services offering and we have worked with Sun on a number of major projects. A recent Gartner vendor focus on Sun Microsystems’ Professional and Managed Services recognised Sun as leading traditional competitors in terms of technology, but also as a provider of managed services.

The report goes on to say that “Managed services play to Sun’s strengths as well as its strategy to reduce the amount of service labour by managing and maintaining its, and others’, systems and software via remote monitoring and management as much as possible. Gartner recommends Sun’s managed services for enterprises looking to offload the ongoing management and operations of their premise-based or hosted infrastructures.

In 1994, the Standish study uncovered some other interesting but uncomfortable statistics with an amazing 31 per cent of projects being cancelled before completion, and 88 per cent exceeding the budget, deadline, or both of these. Yet this study was carried out over a decade ago and nowadays more and more IT projects are being delivered successfully. We can help you to be part of the 22% who get it right. Halian has the skills, experience, and IT capabilities to help you to deliver your IT projects successfully contact us now to find out more.