Winston Churchill said “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm” and by that mark many of us can give ourselves a pat on the back. Unfortunately your chief executive may not see it that way.

So many organisations that I see have a pit of poorly performing systems. The users hold them in low esteem, the IT department has little enthusiasm to improve them and the finance areas are worried about their cost.

So why does the reality look so different from the constant hype of the technology revolution – delivering products and services cheaper, faster and with better quality?

There is a way to be successful with technology projects. Those individuals who have run great change programs would recognize it. Surprisingly there is not a strong presence of firms providing these services (cynics would say that the IT ecosystem makes its money from complexity and rework).

The route to success is to create a connection between the initial strategic idea and the lowest level of detail of the solution.

This powerful technique relies on analysis and traceability – starting with a strategic idea and ending with full benefit realization. It is ineffective to break the chain along the way, purporting to detail strategy in a voluminous document, defining business requirements in isolation to a change agenda or implementing projects without business cases.

The right way to do things relies on experts who can take you through the whole process:

• Strategic analysis – analysing ideas to provide insight and develop strategic plans
• Portfolio and Program analysis – picking the right initiatives and formulating them into a program to deliver benefits
• Project start up analysis – developing the project rationale to steer delivery
• Requirements and data analysis – creating specifications connected to the original idea
• Business change – ensuring those benefits are delivered.

Finally you have to add in the sustaining components of continuous improvement and education. That doesn’t seem that hard does it?

So how confident are you that your organisation is creating the connections that deliver success maybe a business analysis service could help you?