Why Roles Fail — Seven Common Reasons And Remedies

A number of roles in IT can significantly change the organization for good or bad. When they fail, the consequences are severe. From a combination of surveys, interviews, and consulting engagements, we found that each role has its own reasons for failure, but several reasons span all roles. In this first report of a three-part series, we analyze the common reasons for failure across all IT roles and what you can do about them. In the second and third reports in the series, we will determine why specific roles failed and how to mitigate or avoid failure. The roles we analyzed were leaders of applications, infrastructure, and the program management office (PMO), as well as vendor managers, architects, planners, relationship managers, security experts, and demand managers.