Launching successful projects

The most successful projects deliver tangible business value in the first 30 days. By quickly delivering value business people can immediately use, stakeholders can see clear evidence that the project is headed in the right direction and will live up to expectations. Another way to ensure that stakeholders see value immediately is to keep the scope narrow by delivering 20 percent of the capabilities that provide 80 percent of the value. And keep it really simple; it's often better to build systems where the user interface is composed of common office productivity tools like spreadsheets, web browsers, word processing, and personal databases. People already know how to use these tools so there is much less of a learning curve. IT agility like this delivers major business benefits at a fraction of the time and cost otherwise incurred if companies go the conventional route of buying and installing large, complex, all-in-one packages.

Read more about successful IT projects:
- read the blog at CIO

ALSO:
- read this on why too many software projects invite trouble
- and this for tales of projects that crashed and burned