First, let's define best practices in project management. These are techniques or methodologies based on research and numerous successful projects, resulting in delivered systems that exceed expectations. According to the American Productivity and Quality Center, the three main barriers to adoption of best practice techniques are:

• Lack of knowledge of business processes: Project teams are reluctant to take the time to document the current processes, both automated and manual. How you can determine future processes if you are not familiar with how the current ones work?

• Limited desire to make necessary changes: Insurers who do not embrace changes in the industry and who insist on doing things the way they have always done them often cause their own failures. Change is inevitable. How an insurer adopts the changes in methodology says a great deal about their views on technology and their definition of best practice.

• Unskilled technology resources: New technologies require IT professionals to keep pace with developments in the industry. Gone are the days when an IT development team knows only its area of expertise. Modern technology requires broader, skill-based developers who are experienced in integrating applications to different delivery platforms and who understand, at a minimum, how the software fits into the environment.

Taking this a step further, even if all of these barriers have been overcome and project teams have adhered to best practices, they still seem to miss the mark in delivering products and platforms that meet expected results.

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IT leaders explain that overcoming the main barriers and adhering to best practice techniques sometimes are just not enough. In analyzing failed projects, the PMI Institute provided a white paper on the topic of quality of project delivery. Within the study, key adopters discussed three primary factors they found in failed projects: scope issues, quality of developed products and continuous performance measurements.

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Teams have to be able to measure performance and progress when implementing new technology and programs. (Photo: Shutterstock)

Scope issues

The insurance industry, in a push to catch up to advances in technology and gain a competitive edge quickly, chooses to define the entire scope of large systems in the initial delivery of a project. Technology vendors take on engagements and often neglect to spend sufficient time in the up-front planning and requirements-gathering phases of projects.

The primary reasons given for this lack of time commitment are aggressive schedules to complete the work and an effort to minimize costs for the client. The result is a lack of understanding of detailed requirements from a business perspective. Even though the technology meets best practices in system development, it fails in satisfying the speed, scalability and performance the client needs to meet the demands of the ever-changing insurance industry. Many times, encompassing all of the system at once leads to significant delays, missed deadlines, inefficient processes and poor performing systems.

Quality of developed products

Failed projects often point directly to the quality of the products developed. Poor quality of the product is frequently a result of the project team's unclear understanding of the needs of the organization. Business analysts who generally have the responsibility to provide process flows for the current and future state of an application may not be insurance savvy.

They will provide good form and best practice in documentation, but either define requirements in a vacuum, not understanding the full picture, or may lack clarity in how to improve current processes related to the main focus for insurers, i.e., claims, underwriting, regulatory. The result is poor quality in product delivery that does not satisfy the client's needs.

Performance measurements

Failed project delivery is a result of a lack of continuous monitoring of progress to catch defects and issues within the delivery life cycle. Without measuring performance of project teams and their progress, projects fail a significant number of times. Project management requires constant telescoping of people, timelines and budget. Proper project management techniques and tools are a necessity, not a luxury, and they must be appropriate for newer delivery techniques. Ensuring the organization or the vendor has access to today's tools to monitor progress is essential to the health of any project.

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Along with proper measurement, there must be honest, open dialogue from all involved. Without input from users, project team members, vendors and others, improper processes, lack of understanding of requirements and issues may not be uncovered. Frequently, vendors engaged in project and product delivery assume that projects are on track and running smoothly if they have no feedback from the organization. Honest and frequent collaboration is key, but sometimes project managers are not familiar with the use of good tracking tools and lack the ability to ask the right questions of their clients.

Project managers in today's ever-changing business world must keep pace and focus on the barriers and shortcomings of failed projects to learn and understand how to overcome them in product and project delivery. It's no longer enough to follow IT industry best practices. Success requires an understanding of the insurance industry, governmental regulations and how to bring speed, scalability and performance along with more agile, modernized technology and tools to meet the demands of insurers and their partners.

Maria Zabetakis is senior program manager for Saint Petersburg, Florida-based VIP Software.