One of the biggest reasons why enterprise initiatives fail or never get off the ground is that the scope and target audience is often too big.  Don't bite off more then you can chew!

Many IT leaders are trying do the right thing and implement change in their organization in areas like enterprise architecture, business process reengineering, service oriented architectures, and many other bold initiatives.  Where they often go wrong is that they try to implement these initiatives across the entire organization right out of the gates.

As we all know, large scale change is extremely challenging and even intimidating.  The larger the scope, the longer it will take to implement.  The longer it takes to implement, the more likely it will fail.

Here's a better plan.  Find a key project with high visibility.  Implement the desired change for that project and measure the cost/benefits.  This gives you several advantages.  First, it shortens your time to market.  Second, it limits your risks.  Third, it gives you an opportunity to learn from your mistakes and refine your approach before implementing enterprise wide and finally, it reduces the amount of your initial investment.

Here is a real life example.  At a mid sized company, IT had been campaigning to implement a business process management (BPM) initiative for a long time but could never convince management to make the investment.  One day, IT discovered that an executive in the business was being asked by the CEO to streamline operations and cut costs.  IT then partnered with the business executive and focused the initiative on a specific area of the business, as opposed to the trying to implement BPM enterprise wide. 

Now IT had a key executive sponsor  who didn't need to be convinced to change and was willing to fund the initiative.  In addition, the scope was reduced to changing about 5% of the business's processes and impacting only about 10% of the company's staff.  As the project progressed, other areas of the business started lining up to be the next guinea pig.  The team also collected metrics to show ROI and operational improvements. 

The team is now well on its way to delivering huge cost benefits to the business.  Funding for the next initiatives will be easy to justify.  The company will be able to gradually adopt BPM and evolve over time without any interruption to its normal business functions.

Bigger is not better when it comes to delivering projects.  Create smaller, manageable projects, deliver early and often, and change the world.

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