IT projects should start with IT people

It’s not terribly often that the planets align just right, and you see with extraordinary clarity how several seemingly disparate projects or initiatives can fit together into an elegant array. At such moments, your work can come together like Voltron. 

But most times, when dealing with heavy-duty IT projects, the converse is true: All kinds of mayhem abound as several different teams try to reinvent their own wheel and bolt it onto the corporate IT chassis. When there is little central coordination or no technical core person or group that plays keeper in design meetings, a lot of time and energy is usually wasted, and the end result of all efforts is perhaps not quite as cohesive as it should have been.

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This is how you wind up with a massive SAN bought and built for a relatively small project that sits right next to a massive SAN constructed for a different project. Each is using maybe 15 percent of its overall capacity, in terms of both storage and load, and will never require more than that. Instead of consolidating those two endeavors and saving a pile of time and money, the units are destined to run essentially at idle until they’re replaced, costing twice what they should have along the way. This, friends, is the result of poor internal communication. It’s also how storage salesdroids own summer houses in the Hamptons.

It doesn’t have to be all ravage and waste. A firm technical hand in the design and planning stages of these projects can identify these overlapping requirements and devise appropriate solutions that satisfy everyone’s needs without major duplication of effort and expense.

The key here is that these people need to be invited to the right meetings, or alternately, any project that touches IT should be required to involve these people from the outset. Time and again, it seems that numerous manners of schemes are cooked up in nontechnical meetings, with outside vendors bending all the nontechnical ears that they can, promising “My Little Pony” outcomes while glossing over the steaming cesspool that forms their integration “strategy.” I’d like to think that the era of technical contracts signed without IT involvement are behind us, but I don’t think we’re there yet.

All this makes it that much sweeter when things happen the right way, when initiatives dovetail into existing and planned infrastructure like cogs in a machine, when proper planning prevents piss-poor performance. That’s the bull’s-eye IT veterans aim for. It’s a primary goal not just to curtail waste, but because it will require less time and headache to administer, and mainly, it’s done properly. Too many elements of IT are simply not done properly, and when we have the opportunity to ensure that the job is done right, it’s a cause for minor celebration.

Many jaded IT admins will get wind of the rudderless boondoggle, then settle in their chairs, wait for the inevitable, and resign themselves to having to deal with whatever mess has been cooked up by those who don’t understand how these things work. In doing so, they’re working against their own best interests.

It’s universally better if deep IT is involved in the initial stages of a new solution, as the time and agony saved is all but guaranteed to be their own. If nobody is inviting IT to these meetings, invite yourself. If mysterious vendors are showing up and talking to management, make sure to figure out what’s going on before it becomes a problem and POs are cut.

The opportunity to elegantly mesh together many existing and planned infrastructure and projects may not come around often, but the goal is to make that not quite so rare. A few instances of successfully corralling projects in their infancy, and the ensuing successful deployments, might resonate with the right people, and the projects that wind up flying off the rails due to poor initial planning will become the exception rather than the rule.

We can only hope because the sleep and stress saved will ultimately be our own.

This story, “IT projects should start with IT people,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Paul Venezia’s The Deep End blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.