IT too often starts with the technology, occasionally starts with the process, and seldom starts with the people. Technology works when it is viewed as a tool to assist people and support process. Technology makes people more efficient and processes more reliable. It seldom makes something possible that was impossible without it. Put another way, good people can deal with bad process and inadequate tools, and good processes will compensate for inadequate tools, but installing good tools won’t fix bad process, and the best processes in the world don’t make good people.

Almost every project is about transformation not implementation. The real fundamental objective is to change the way people think and behave in some way: higher quality, higher sales, greater efficiency, more knowledge sharing, or better customer service. It is a cultural transformation. A change of mindset. It is changing people. By changing the people we make it possible to change the results of the process. This is far and away the most neglected aspect of IT projects.

To change attitudes you change behavior. To change behavior you change processes and procedures. To make those changes more efficient you think about introducing technology to meet the gaps, bottlenecks, error-generators and inefficiencies you have found in your proceedures. Don’t start with things: tools, technologies, documents, forms, websites … start with people: communicate, motivate, educate.

Follow Kotter: form a coalition, find champions, get some momentum. Then start worrying about how it is going to work by determining roles, start designing processes and procedures, etc. Tools come way down the list.

Does cultural change sound like hard work? Not as hard as trying to change process without the support of the people. Sound expensive? Yes, a third of your investment should be in the people. How many business cases or projects have you seen where 10% of the total budget was on training and communications? Even if you count every workshop and walk through that involves the users, I bet it is seldom near 33%.

This means the overall cost of the project will be higher. Consider it as cementing your investment in process and technology. If you don’t spend on cultural change, your work on process and tools will not deliver; you won’t fully realise the ROI. Either the implementation will fail, or it will go live but later fall into disuse and disrepair. That is what I discuss in the Silence is Not Assent article. Do it properly. Plan for cultural change, spend for it, and do it as part of the project.

See the Forrest

Think about the implications of this. Projects will cost more. Money comes from a finite pool, so there will be less projects. We will have to eliminate some. That won’t be hard, because the increased costs will destroy the business case for a number of them. Why on earth would we do that? The answer is simple. Because the way we currently cost projects is a fantasy.

If we do not include those people-costs in our business case, they don’t go away. They are still there. They are a hidden unaccounted cost that will come out of IT somewhere, as emergency funding when the project begins to fail, or as an unfair load dumped on business-as-usual operational budgets once the project goes live (procedures, training, monitoring, coaching, KPIs, support, maintenance changes, etc.).

Or, worse still, the money won’t come from somewhere else. The project will limp into production without proper culture change. The users haven’t bought in. Nobody understands why we’re doing it or what the benefits are for the organisation and for them personally. There is no wave of enthusiasm, no champions. Users and operators are not properly trained in changes to their own work procedures. The "dead cat" gets chucked over the wall (another of my PMPlanet articles). There will be a massively increased probability of failure due to resistance, white-anting, lack of ownership, frustrated users, wrongly executed procedures and all the ills of a project without proper attention to people.

So, when we do not design people aspects into our projects from the start, and so we don’t budget properly for them, we either damage our organisation by forcing unplanned work later to make up the deficiencies, or we greatly increase the risk of failure of our projects. This contributes a lot to IT's aweful project success rate.

If we properly cost projects from the start, with all those soft fuzzy easily-ignored people-costs built in, then we will assess more realistic business cases. Some projects won’t get up. Guess what: they are the ones that never should have seen the light of day anyway. If the business case only works by neglecting people and culture, then the project is a bad, risky idea.

Across IT, across the world, we are trying to do too much too fast with too little, and it is the people-aspect of projects that we ignore in order to achieve that. When tools fail, we chuck another tool at it. When processes fail, we adopt silver-bullet process frameworks. It seldom occurs to us to apply that simple mantra: people, process, technology, in equal amounts, in that order.

Rob England is an author, commentator, and consultant. He is currently working on a book about People First in IT. More thoughts from Rob can be found on his IT Skeptic blog at www.itskeptic.org and at ITSMWatch.com, where he is a regular contributor.