Page 91 - Straight Talk On Project Management IV

their PC at the end of the working day, four months of increasingly hostile support submissions could
have been avoided.

VAR is going the same way, pundits, players and fans are now becoming increasingly hostile.

Poor Execution
For VAR, in fact, for any IT Project, it’s all in the execution. Writing on VAR for ESPN, Gabriele
Marcotti says, "Even the best ideas struggle if poorly executed ... it was implemented in a way that
lay somewhere between ill-advised and ham-fisted -- and a range of cultural and extraneous factors
only exacerbated the situation."

Wow! Gabriele could be describing a handful of IT Projects you and I will have come across in our
time!! Here in England, The Premier League and PGMOL (Professional Game Match Officials Limited,
the body that runs VAR), chose to do things differently from the rest of the world. There would be
no on-field reviews (OFRs or when the referee runs to the pitchside to look at a screen) and there
would be a "high bar" for VAR to intervene in the first place.

Although there was logic in this thinking, it did lead to a less than impressive introduction. There will
also be some logic in poor decisions you take as you execute your IT Project, nobody makes a bad
decision on purpose. Creating a subconscious filter to ‘proofread’ your thinking is a great skill to
acquire!

Ensure That Your IT Project Actually Makes Things Better.
Watching the football at the weekend, there felt like a disproportionate amount of time was spent
‘standing around waiting for a decision to be made’. The air feels like it’s been sucked out of the
ground when a VAR challenge happens, a goal scorer’s celebrations are put on hold, a drowsy,
sedated feeling of numbness falls over the crowd, it feels like someone watching has hit pause so
they can take a bathroom break. The whole point of football, to me, is that you lose yourself in the
match, that everything is played out right there, in front of you, on the pitch. Now, with VAR an
invisible outside influence regularly takes control.

IT Projects more generally can be guilty of this. Organisations can be so keen to address one problem
that they are blind to the fact that their solution could be having a negative impact elsewhere. It
happens more often than it should. I remember, about five years ago, a friend had spent blood,
sweat and tears on a project that, upon delivery, just wasn’t fit for purpose (to be fair due to scope
interference that reduced its stability), it has made things worse and the end-users revolted. An old
system was reinstated, and, despite months of further work, the new software never saw the light of
day again.

Who Actually Wants The Project?
It’s interesting now, listening to managers, players, TV pundits, fans and even some referees
complain about VAR. It does beg the question, who asked for it in the first place?

Often, the problem with an IT Project is just that no-one who uses it really wants it.

One friend, owner and Managing Director of a shopfitting firm often looks back with regret at a
project that almost cost him his business – it certainly lost him some key talent. From the day the
business was founded, each department was running like a silo – sales, stock control, production,
purchasing, transport, finance and accounts all had their own little systems. The systems could talk
to each other, the sales team generating an order could be accessed by the Stores Controller to
check stock and prompt the purchasing manager to buy in component parts, etc, but there was a
human element needed to make this happen. The MD wanted more transparency, a system that was