Does adoption equal project success?

February 19, 2008 · Filed Under Project Management

It seems trite to state that user adoption drives success of an IT project. For example, imagine that some OLAP cubes or a series of reports are made available to a group of business users. If the majority of them make use of them, then a reasonable ROI can be calculated and the project declared a success. However, when an IT project is first proposed, does the business case assume a realistic rate of adoption? Is adoption even considered? Does the adoption rate have to be anywhere near 100% in order to make the project viable? Failing to give serious thought to these questions can lead to a negative ROI, even if the technology implementation is flawless.In his book, Common Approach, Uncommon Results, Ian Gotts of Nimbus, proposes a formula to be applied to all technology projects: Results = Initiatives x Adoption squared. Though the book itself can be light on the details, it does outline a framework for driving wide scale user adoption, and not just user acceptance. The adoption rate of technology in the enterprise may seem like a squishy metric, but ignoring it introduces additional risk to any project.

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