Lack of skills blamed for IT project delays

A new study claims that 76% of organisations in the UK with at least 1,000 employees are unable to deliver all their IT projects on time, with a lack of skills being highlighted as one of the main contributory factors.

The study, undertaken by MuleSoft, looked at the state of IT and digital transformation, surveying 800 CIOs and IT decision makers in global organisations with at least 1,000 employees.

It claims that the majority of organisations have started 2020 with a backlog of unfinished projects. This is against a backdrop of IT pressures intensifying as project demands increase, largely due to the surge in new digital transformation initiatives.

Overall the survey found that 59% of IT leaders were not able to deliver all of the projects they had committed to in 2019. And in the UK the situation is even worse, with three quarters (76%) of organisations failing to meet their project deadlines.

According to respondents, the inability to deliver projects on time is down to a combination of a lack of time, funding and, crucially, skills.

These findings are reinforced by other industry surveys that clearly identify the top three project management challenges as being poorly trained project managers, attempting too many projects and a lack of project funding.

There’s no doubt that effective project management-related training can have a significant impact on an organisation’s performance. This was highlighted recently by further research from the Project Management Institute (PMI) which considered some of the key differences between high performing and under-performing businesses.

It found that, typically, high performing businesses are committed to ongoing project management training, together with a formal process to develop project management competency. They also prioritise the development of project management technical and management leadership skills. These are all areas in which under-performing companies tend to score lowly.

And the demand for skilled project management professionals is certainly on the rise. In fact, one of the key findings in the MuleSoft study is that half of the IT leaders polled are facing a 40% increase in project requests this year, compared to a 32% increase last year. At the same time, their IT budgets are projected to increase by less than 10%. So the challenge is clear: there’s a requirement to achieve more with less, which in turn makes effective project management training more important than ever…