Guessing is not a strategy: How to build decision velocity with AI and real-time data
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IT's Never Over
IT project managers must go beyond just doing the work, and show real interest in the results of the work.
All project managers, especially ones working for internal IT groups, should be wary of the use of the word "completed" to describe their projects, warns Mike Cooper, president of consulting firm New England Project Services. "Far too many IT project managers raise their hands and claim success when a new system has passed user acceptance tests and is put into production. They think they have already succeeded because they have delivered the system, and maintenance is typically regarded as a boring bug-fix phase with some minor enhancements."
Instead, IT project managers should think of this post-project work as value enhancement, Cooper suggests. At the very least, he advises project managers to go back to the customer at three months, six months and one year to ask, "How's it going? What value are you getting from the system, and what could be done to enhance that value?"
"If a vendor or an internal IT shop shifts their mental mode in this way, it can have a big payback in terms of how you are valued as a supplier to the business," Cooper adds. "This is because instead just of being interested in doing the work (building the system), you are showing real interest in the results of the work. And it is the results that were the reason for doing the project in the …
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