Hamilton Technology Management

Project Assessment, Recovery, and Control | Governance and Compliance Support

About Us | What We Do | Methods and Practices | Project Profiles

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“In war, truth is the first casualty.”

- from “Agamemnon”, Aeschylus, c. 500 BCE

The same principle applies to technology projects.

Ever think about these questions?

Which projects that you have governance responsibility for are likely to meet or exceed their goals?

How many will miss their goals by a little?

How many will miss them by a lot?

How many have up-to-date business cases to support them?

How about project risk management plans?

What measurable business improvements are your completed IT projects providing?

Do you know if the governance support information you are getting is objective and unbiased?

Executives with governance and compliance responsibilities need good answers to these questions.

How “Asymmetric Information” hides the truth about your IT investments

New and unforgiving Governance and Compliance responsibilities make it more important than ever for non-IT executives to get accurate, timely, detailed, and UNBIASED information – the Unvarnished Truth – about the state of IT investments under their watch.

Too often, executives find themselves either in the dark or forced to rely on “Asymmetric Information” – information from developers, vendors, business sponsors, with a lot of pieces left out or distorted, and a lot of self-interest attached.

Most of those providing asymmetric information have an understandable bias toward "Keep going." When jobs, reputations, and revenue depend on continuing what may be a doomed or worthless effort, it is not hard to predict what bad decisions can result.

All successful projects are alike. All failed projects fail in their own way.

Superficial successes = Long-fuse failures

Since the late 1960s, most Information Technology projects – and investments – have failed to deliver the value they had promised. This even includes projects that come in on time, on or under budget, and with all their planned functions working correctly. These “Long-Fuse Failures” fail to add enough actual business value to justify the time, effort and money invested in them.

Managing in the “Yellow Zone”

Hamilton Technology Management specializes in “Yellow Zone Projects” – business/technology alignment projects that need intervention to stay on course, or get back on course. A Yellow Zone Project may be behind schedule, over budget, or experiencing other problems that may be serious but not yet fatal.

Industry, government, and university research indicates that anywhere from 50 to 70 percent of ALL projects are in the Yellow Zone at some point. The same research indicates that their true status is often a mystery to those responsible for corporate governance and technology investment oversight.

A Yellow-Zone Project that delivers a superficially successful solution based on an outdated business case is a Long-Fuse Failure in the making. It gives the right answer to the wrong problem. Asymmetric Information – or a simple LACK of information – means that too many Yellow-Zone Projects end up as Long-Fuse Failures.

Short-fuse or long-fuse, every failure represents a unique story of things gone wrong. Usually it is a story told too late to make a difference. And Asymmetric Information is usually at the heart of the matter.

Compounding the problem: unjustifiable costs and scarce resources

Compliance and technology governance resources: the cost crunch

Some compliance and governance engagements require large teams with a formal management layer and a lot of support from the larger consulting organization. Most don’t.

A typical compliance and governance support engagement requires a single professional or a small team, either self-directed, or client-led. For these engagements, the markups that traditional consultancies add to the hourly rates of consulting professionals increase compliance and governance costs, but add little or no justifying value.

Another cost crunch contributor? Documentation. Many executives make process documentation a low priority, but ultimately run into the "Pay me now, pay me MORE later" rule. Recent surveys have shown that updating, correcting, and otherwise cleaning up process documentation can account for over 50% of the total cost of governance and compliance.

The resource crunch

For executives with new, more stringent responsibilities for governance and compliance, it has become harder, not easier to find qualified resources. Full-time resources with the skill and experience to perform governance and compliance functions AND see past Asymmetric Information are hard to find. Resources who can fix the most critical deficiencies through an efficient, effective, but also cost-cutting operational model are even harder to find.

Where Do WE Come In?

Hamilton Technology Management addresses two problems for non-IT executives responsible for compliance and governance:

Asymmetric Information. We provide objective, unbiased, expert information about the true state of IT investments. We help non-IT executives cut through the fog of Asymmetric Information to get to the Unvarnished Truth. We guarantee that our findings and recommendations are free of Asymmetric Information by refusing follow-on work.

Governance and compliance costs and resources. We can cut documentation costs down to size. We use a rigorous process to update, improve, and maintain documentation needed for governance and compliance. We can help you get governance and compliance documentation ready for upload into a process repository such as SOX Express or Paisley Focus. And our rates eliminate the low-value, no-value markup that most other consultancies charge.

We can help you get past Asymmetric Information to the Unvarnished Truth!

We can help you at a cost that makes sense!

Contact Us

You can reach us at (609) 977-6214 or by email at Info@HamiltonTechMgt.net