IT Best Practices for Financial Managers

Chapter 4. Critical Success Factors for IT Implementations

Ajay Bhatia

Angela Mattix

Have you ever been involved in an information technology (IT) implementation project for your organization that has been considered less than successful? If so, you are not alone. When embarking on an IT implementation project, many organizations achieve less than the expected results.

Why is this the case? Well, there are numerous factors that contribute to the perceived, as well as actual, success or failure of a project. In this chapter, we will explore some of the key critical success factors (CSFs) and why they are important. Critical success factors are the essential areas of activity that must be performed well if you are to achieve the mission, objectives, or goals for your business or implementation. The advantages of identifying CSFs are that they are simple to understand, help focus attention on major issues, are easy to monitor, and can be used in concert with application implementation methodologies.

Identifying and monitoring CSFs is important, as they allow the implementation team to focus their efforts on building their capabilities to meet these CSFs and allow the team to decide whether it has the capability to build the requirements necessary to be successful.

By identifying your implementation-critical success factors prior to launching a project, you can create a common point of reference to help you direct and measure the success of your implementation.

Our top-ten critical success ...