Page 15 - Straight Talk On Project Management IV

IT Project Teams are STILL driving competitive advantage

“Behind every great, growing business is a successful IT
Project team”.
This was the working title of a blog post that I started
writing in early March 2020.

Looking back at it now, it was a wonderfully optimistic
piece about how IT Project teams were inspiring,
facilitating and delivering business change in every
successful business that I could think of.

Sadly, I never finished the article. The UK was put into
lockdown on 23 March in an unprecedented step to
attempt to limit the spread of coronavirus. All our
priorities changed in that instant, as business growth
forecasts were side-lined, and we all focussed on business survival.
What if my belief, that behind every successful business was a successful and dynamic IT Project
team, was still true? What if it were even more important for businesses after Covid-19 and
lockdown to have an innovative IT Project team?
Consider the changes that your business has been forced to implement since that announcement on
23rd March – the ones that have kept your lights on and your business wheels turning. The Zoom
calls, the Microsoft Teams, the remote working, the streamlining of systems so that fewer people
can manage the workload of furloughed colleagues, etc, etc. What do they all have in common?
They are all IT initiatives.

At the heart of every surviving business is an IT or IT Project team that is still inspiring, facilitating
and delivering business change.

Remember survival is the new success! It is a story that we should be rightly proud of.

So, what’s next for IT Project Teams?
Most major business IT Projects are on hold. This makes perfect sense. Most major business IT
projects were designed to help create or deliver business growth, and thanks to the recession
caused by Covid-19, there’s not a lot of growth to be found. Economies are contracting, businesses
that were spending on their future are cutting costs just to survive their present.

Smart IT Project leaders identified this early on, they had the best handle on where efficiencies could
be made and where processes could be improved - and they found that business leaders were more
open to hearing about them than ever. There are lessons for the rest of us to learn.

In his book ‘Management Challenges for the 21st Century’, Peter Drucker wrote that, “Continuous
process improvements transform the business. They lead to innovation. They lead to new processes.
They lead to new business.”

Drucker wrote these words in 1999!!! BUT they feel even more appropriate now.