Mistake No. 11: They give short shrift to change management.

Impact: All the time, money and hard work that went into delivering a new IT-enabled capability can be for naught if users don't adopt the new technology.

Solution: Spend time up front during the project planning phase to consider where resistance to a project will manifest itself and ways to address it, says Métier's Clark. Identify the stakeholders whose jobs will be impacted by the new capability, adds Intellilink Solutions' Kondo, and plan how you'll communicate changes to their processes and workflows with them. Not all of the changes will be negative.

Mistake No. 12: Project schedules are incomplete.

Impact: Project team members don't know what is due when, which makes completing the project on time a challenge.

Solution: Clark says a quick way to come up with a schedule for a project is to determine all the activities involved in getting the project done (e.g. scoping, getting requirements, testing and implementing) and then attaching due dates to those activities based on the deadline for the project. Project management software can also help create schedules.

Communication Problems

Mistake No. 13: IT doesn't push back on unreasonable deadlines.

Impact: IT sets itself up to fail and gets a reputation for not being able to deliver projects on time.

Clark says IT departments will scramble to accommodate project deadlines set by the CEO. But tampering with dependencies and with the plan only creates more problems that make delivering the project on time even more difficult, he says.

Solution: IT management has to explain to the CEO what it's going to take to meet that deadline in terms of cost and resources and has to get the CEO to choose between cost, scope and schedule, says Clark.

Mistake No. 14: They don't communicate well with project sponsors and stakeholders.

Impact: IT fails to deliver the expected requirements.

Solution: Project communications need to be catered to the audience, says Kondo. She sees misunderstandings about the scope of a project or a systems' requirements arise when IT departments hand over a spreadsheet to the business with thousands of lines describing the systems' functionality and specs. Because the business owners don't have time to look over such detailed technical documents, they ignore them.

"One side is communicating, but in a language the other side can't understand," says Kondo. "Then IT gets frustrated and they say, 'We described this to them. How come this isn't what they want?'" (Business analysts play a critical role as the liaisons between users and IT.)