Page 71 - Straight Talk On Project Management IV

Cognitive dissonance – the silent IT Project killer (and how to combat it)

Have you ever worked on an IT Project, utterly
convinced that everything that you are doing will bring
success, only to have the project fail to deliver?

I mean, we’ve all been there at some point in our
careers. In many ways it’s a stupid question because,
well, why would you do things that you weren’t certain
would bring success? In other ways it is a brilliant
question, projects do fail, and I’ve never met an IT
Project Manager, team member, CIO or stakeholder
who set out deliberately to destroy their own project.

When IT Projects fail, it is really useful to carry out a
post-mortem and establish what went wrong. Often
these debriefs reveal evidence that was there all along,
but not acted upon, that could have saved the project. Sometimes these signs are missed (we’re all
busy) but sometimes they are ignored, either consciously or subconsciously because the new
evidence doesn’t fit our world view.

This is cognitive dissonance.
In psychology, cognitive dissonance is the discomfort you feel mentally, the actual psychological
stress experienced, when you hold two or more contradictory beliefs, values or ideas. It happens
when new evidence contradicts your beliefs, ideals, and values and you look for a way to resolve this
contradiction and to reduce your discomfort.

It happened recently to a friend’s IT project. He had been working on an app to rival a competitor’s,
but they were struggling from the start! The rival app had disrupted the market and left everyone
else playing catch up and looking back, he told me, this was probably their best hope – to catch up,
maybe make some marginal gains over the challenger. The project they were working on would
deliver, they hoped, at least an equal product and service offer to stop their customer’s deserting to
the rival who was quickly gaining market share. The project was sapping resources across the
portfolio but without it, the business would suffer further losses.
In the meantime, something happened. The company my friend works for bought the other firm, the
challenger, and although it was all subject to regulatory clearance, a wholesale merger was
inevitable.

Now, reading this in the cold light of day, what’s the obvious course of action given this new
situation? The project you’re working on is burning up resources to deliver something, at best,
marginally better than something else that, by acquisition, your firm now owns … it’s not hard, is it?

Sadly, no-one made this call. The brief had been to create a product to rival or improve upon the
rival app and that’s what they continued to do. They threw hours, money and resources at it, even
complementing their in-house talent with drafted in external resources.

It was months before a management reshuffle saw C-suite talent from the acquired company
migrate to the board of the new larger firm and the first thing they noticed was this rather pointless