If an IT system has been delivered and is not working, or if an IT system is being implemented but is a “death march, there is a chance that it can be made to work. All that you have to do is get it over the line.
Our legal system in the UK is an adversarial one, where both sides argue a position and ultimately a judge will make a decision over which side is likely to be correct. The remedy that the courts can make is typically limited to making one side pay the other, which may or may not include costs.
For complex projects, the process of getting to trial takes 12-18 months, on top of the time you spent on the project prior to going to court. That is a tremendous amount of wasted time.
If the project can be made to function, it can be very difficult to get both sides working together again as the trust will almost certainly have completely broken down. It can also be the case that the supplier (or the customer) cannot see certain issues with the project because they have been mired for so long.
In both cases, what is required is a collaborative, mediated approach to getting the project to final sign-off.
This can’t be done with a good project manager as there will be deep seated technical and business process issues that are stopping the project working. It isn’t an administrative or management problem, this type of dispute can only resolved by bringing in a highly technical independent expert who remit is to get the project to sign-off and keep the parties out of court.
I have nearly 25+ years industry experience working with companies deliver complex IT and software systems. Now I work almost exclusively on this form of alternative dispute resolution.
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