Companies often allow their suppliers to avoid financial
liability when IT projects run into problems, according to Allan
Watton, managing director of the Best Practice Group.
Watton told the IT Directors Forum that suppliers presenting
themselves as specialists had a duty of “reasonable care and skill”
under English law. This means that IT users are entitled by law to
be paid for project delays or the failure of the project to meet
business objectives. Suppliers have to tell users what they are
going to provide, what they are not going to provide, and what
consequences the project will have on the rest of the business.
Although firms automatically benefit from legal protection, most
of them remove that protection by changing business objectives,
processes or implementation plans after the contract has been
signed, said Watton. By doing so, IT users leave themselves liable
to the costs of putting the project back on track.
Often staff, in trying to get a project back on track,
completely undermine any common law protection their employers have
because they deviate from the contract terms when they encounter
problems.
Watton laid out six steps for users to follow when projects go
wrong:
● Read your contracts
● Document every problem
● Create a process for managing the project
● Set clear milestones to resolve the problem
● Stop paying the supplier
● Treat all project information as potentially false.