As a seasoned IT professional, I’ve witnessed the fleeting brilliance of many tech initiatives. They soar into the spotlight, much like a meteor blazing across the night sky, only to vanish as quickly as they appeared. These projects, while momentarily illuminating, often leave no lasting mark on the business landscape. It’s a rare sight to see an IT endeavor that not only captures attention but also delivers enduring value.

Identifying Projects That Matter

So how do you figure out which IT projects will actually make a significant impact? The answer lies in looking closely at the business itself. What’s holding your company back? What’s the biggest limitation that’s preventing your business from reaching its full potential? What’s stopping you from doubling, or even tripling your revenue or effectiveness?

Every business runs into limitations at some point. It might be a cap on the number of customers you can support, a bottleneck in your production process, or even a mental block, like the number of employees you can manage effectively. These limitations can be physical, like space or capital, or they can be intangible, like management bandwidth or market reach.

When your business bumps up against one of these limits, growth slows down. Sure, you might still grow, but not at the pace you could if that limitation didn’t exist. Companies often respond by trying new strategies: pivoting to a new market, acquiring other businesses, or even restructuring to tackle the problem from different angles. Take W. L. Gore and Associates, the folks behind Gore-Tex® fabric. They avoid creating huge, complex organizations. Instead, they expand by adding more plants, each with just a few hundred employees, working in a flat, team-based structure. It’s a way of growing without getting bogged down by the limitations of size.

Challenging Perceived Limitations

Here’s the thing: many of the limitations businesses face aren’t as immovable as they seem. It reminds me of the story about elephants in India. When they’re young, they’re chained to small stakes they can’t pull out of the ground. As they grow, they get strong enough to easily break free, but they don’t even try because they’re conditioned to believe they’re still trapped.

Businesses fall into the same trap. I’m often amazed by the assumptions that executives make. They think certain products won’t sell, certain sales techniques won’t work, or customers won’t adapt to new technologies. These assumptions go unchallenged for years — until a competitor comes along and proves them wrong.

Making Projects Count

The IT projects that truly matter are the ones that remove or drastically reduce a critical business limitation. Projects that don’t address these limitations might make life a little easier for some, but they don’t make a lasting impact on the business. They’re fluff — quickly forgotten and unlikely to be remembered in the long run.

Unfortunately, most IT projects fall into this category. They focus on minor improvements to business processes that, while helpful, don’t move the needle in a significant way. If you want your IT organization to stand out and get the recognition it deserves, you need to focus on eliminating key business limitations.

For example, back in the mid-2000s, I worked with a financial services company bogged down by a labor-intensive accounting process. Labor was the biggest limitation on their business. We did a study and found that 80% of labor time was spent on just 20% of the processes. So, we focused our IT efforts on those processes, boosting labor efficiency by over 200% within a year. We didn’t spend a ton of money or use cutting-edge technology — just basic IT principles applied where they could make the biggest impact.

We didn’t stop there. As efficiency improved, we tackled other limitations: quality, customer communication, and financial controls. The journey never really ended; it just shifted as the business grew and new limitations emerged.

How to Identify Significant Business Limitations

Here are some tips for spotting the limitations that are holding your business back:

1. Look from the Outside-In: Consider what’s limiting your business from the customer’s perspective. What do they want that you can’t provide? What do your competitors offer that you don’t?
2. Analyze Financial Statements: Where is most of your money going? Is there a way to cut costs significantly by applying technology?
3. Challenge “Immovable” Limitations: Regularly test assumptions that certain limitations are set in stone. Technology changes, and so do market conditions. What wasn’t possible a few years ago might be doable now.
4. Use Fill-in-the-Blank Statements: Try prompts like, “My business would be [better, faster, more profitable] if only I could [do something, stop doing something].” Brainstorm ideas and pick the most promising ones to pursue.
5. Break Big Projects into Smaller Pieces: Larger projects are more likely to fail. When tackling a major business limitation, break it down into smaller, manageable chunks. These smaller steps are easier to fund and have a higher chance of success.

Conclusion

There’s a tradition of making a wish when you see a shooting star, but it takes more than wishes to create a successful IT project. By identifying and overcoming significant business limitations, and applying the right processes and technology, you can ensure that your project will have a lasting impact — more than just a brief flash in the sky. And who knows, you might just become a star in your own right.