Excellence in IT project management – firing agile silver bullets

With almost thirty years since the start of our quest to find Fred Brooks’ magical “Silver Bullet” to slay our productivity horrors, and twenty years since the first Standish report on IT project success and failures, are we getting closer? This paper discusses and challenges current thinking on process improvement initiates to provide answers of how we can significantly improve IT project productivity and consider that to achieve a step change in improvement requires a different approach. Recent Standish research has highlighted the Agile Methodology as being particularly successful for the smaller IT project. However, what specifically is creating this improvement? Is it the process itself or is there something that the process enables? The hypothesis presented is that in order to create the step change improvement in IT project management delivery, we need to significantly improve the inter-personal skills of the whole IT project management team. The revolution for improved productivity will stem from challenging the typical career paths of technology learning to provide a much greater focus on the softer skills.