Organizations often blame IT for failing to implement software that can help manage IT as a business. In truth, these failures often are the result of other internal factors. Discover what the most common business roadblocks are to ITM success, how to recognize them, and what you can do to proactively take actions to remove these potential pitfalls.

1. According to several recent Gartner reports, IT spending accounts for more than U.S.$3 trillion1
, equaling approximate-
ly 4.4 percent of the company OPEX2
. While figures such as these illustrate the importance of ITM management for
business success, many companies choose not to invest in ITM software. Their reasoning is that ITM implementations
often prove too risky and complex, exceeding time and budget without achieving the intended business goals. The
question then is how to reconcile the importance of ITM with the poor track record of selecting, planning, and imple-
menting ITM software.
The answer is “mitigating risk.” When properly selected, managed, and executed, ITM implementations can prove high-
ly beneficial to almost any organization. As the next wave of ITM emerges, we expect more and more companies to
deploy these types of solutions. Because of this forecasted increase in adoption, IT staff and business leaders as well as
the program management office will need to become familiarized with common hazards associated with ITM imple-
mentation, the extenuating circumstances that arise as a result of these mistakes, and actions to take to avoid these
challenges.
 The five most common pitfalls for ITM implementation are as follows:
 Inadequate ITM software
 Poor ITM scoping
 Lack of executive management commitment
 Insufficient change management and training programs
 Inexperienced project management and teams
Five Key Factors for Successful IT
Management (ITM) Implementations
By Mike Gruia, Chairman, UMT
A UMT Whitepaper
Organizations often blame IT for failing to implement software that can help manage IT as a business. In truth,
these failures often are the result of other internal factors. Discover what the most common business
roadblocks are to ITM success, how to recognize them, and what you can do to proactively take actions to
remove these potential pitfalls.
1
Forecast Overview: IT Spending, Worldwide, 4Q12 Update, 28 January 2013
2
IT Metrics: IT Spending and Staffing Report, 2013, 1 February 2013

2. <2>
The following sections break down each challenge and provide prescriptive and proactive behavior to address them.
Inadequate ITM software
Traditional Project Portfolio Management (PPM) and Enterprise Architecture (EA) tools offer a narrow spectrum of ca-
pabilities, resulting in less than optimum solutions that fail to address IT spending and waste. In general, these re-
sources lack financial perspective, are not driven and linked to applications and infrastructure planning decisions, and
ignore the need to coordinate and synchronize efforts across all IT domains (i.e. apps, services, and infrastructure).
While PPM solutions can optimize schedules, they end up only offering a partial view, a less than ideal situation.
Action Items:
 Understand that the driving force behind ITM is integrated resources planning and control.
 Outline the scope of your ITM objectives, taking an all-inclusive approach that incorporates an integrated
EA.
 Enable your IT transactions (i.e. projects, contracts, and operations) to derive from running, growing, and
transforming (RGT) your business. This relatively simple segmentation can be used for planning, justifying
and protecting your IT spending and budgets.
 Dynamically drive resource allocation and budgeting based on your planning decisions.
Poor ITM Scoping
Successful ITM must take into consideration data quality and availability, planning and decision analytics, and process
management elements needed to fulfill management requirements. The scope of ITM however, often takes into ac-
count only core EA topics, omitting data management, business process management, and planning intelligence ana-
lytics. Many organizations fail to understand the need to integrate data across multiple business and IT domains with
transactional data such as projects, contracts, and operations. They also fail to grasp the need to dynamically drive the
resources (i.e. financial and people) required to run IT. As a result, the impact of their ITM pales in comparison to its
potential, leaving users frustrated by ITM's limitations and management annoyed by having to spend more time and
money to achieve the results they believed ITM would deliver to them.
Action Items:
 Understand the scope of your ITM project.
 Ensure that you include enterprise, transaction, resources, and planning considerations.
 Prioritize your organization’s ITM needs based on gaps, strategic needs, and the ability to change.
 Understand the importance of “adjacent data,” meaning data and process models outside ITM, and illus-
trate how your ITM project will interact with this information.
For that last point, keep in mind that ITM does not answer every question, although it does form the heart of most or-
ganizations' application and infrastructure strategies. Many vital processes and data can conceivably remain outside
your ITM solutions. The more of these types of examples that exist in your infrastructure, the greater the need for
better data and business process management.

3. <3>
Lack of Executive Management Commitment
Organizations should not lose sight of the fact that an ITM system fundamentally impacts the business as much as it
does IT. Realistically, ITM capabilities affect your ability to achieve business objectives, reduce costs, and launch prod-
ucts. As a result, your IT department should not take sole responsibility for successfully deploying an ITM solution. By
having executive business management (i.e. CEOs, COOs, CIOs, CFOs and so on) buy-in, sponsor, lead, and direct the
project, you can better illustrate the project’s overall importance to all management and planning levels.
Action Items:
 Obtain and sustain top management support and keep that support transparent throughout ITM design,
planning, and implementation.
 Involve senior management in project sponsorship, project steering committees, quality reviews, and issue
and conflict resolution as a means of keeping your managers informed of the project's progress and sus-
taining their support.
Insufficient Change Management and Training Programs
Change management skills are paramount to the success of any ITM project. To that end, you should institute a com-
prehensive management program at the outset of your ITM project that takes into account the expected and substan-
tial IT process and organizational changes. In addition, put in place an effective training program. Training is a key deliv-
erable of any change management solution and a critical success factor for ITM implementations.
Action Items:
 Conduct educational activities that assist your staff in grasping the project’s importance, benefits, and po-
tential effects.
 Prepare your user community for change. This should be done from a project and business perspective.
 Set realistic expectations by compiling a detailed business case that clearly states the process changes and
functionalities involved in the project and ties those pieces to specific benefits. When necessary, your
change management team should reset users' expectations.
 Place a high priority on quality end-user training. Education and training programs must embrace multiple
methodologies and delivery vehicles, such as one-on-one, classroom, and computer-based training.
Inexperienced Project Management and Teams
A strong project team often serves as the major differentiator between ITM success and failure. In-house project mem-
bers with deep IT management knowledge should be assigned to the project team on a full-time basis for the duration
of the project. These people will be the ones who work closely with the implementation partners. You should also have
a strong internal project manager to see your ITM solution through to its fruition. A successful implementation — on
time and on budget — is as important to the ITM project manager as it is to the entire organization. Loss of or poor
control over the chosen implementation partner is frequently cited as a critical error in ITM projects.
Action Items:
 Appoint a strong, experienced project manager at the outset of the project.
 Maintain rigorous control of the project by using proven methodologies.
 Provide post-implementation support including competency centers to aid in any critical post-go-live sup-
port requirements.

4. Conclusion
Deployment of an ITM solution, although difficult, can be accomplished successfully through a strong discipline and
practice. From our experience, we have found that successful organizations consistently think strategically, taking a
360° view of their enterprise as well as the transactions (projects, contracts, and operations) and resources required
to manage IT.
The advent of powerful new ITM software tools (UMT IT 360) opens up a new level of planning and decision capabili-
ties that can help drive successful ITM implementations.
Be sure your management teams take the time to assess their current ITM discipline as well as the recommendations
covered within this article. True progress begins with understanding where you are relative to your industry and as-
sessing the urgency to change and improve. If you would like to diagnose your organization’s ITM’s capability, please
visit our ITM Scorecard.
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