Today’s demanding competitive landscape is putting more pressure on enterprises to get key technology projects right — but these projects are also failing at higher rates than ever. No-code can help.
Whether large enterprises are investing in new consumer-facing applications or developing platforms to improve internal workflows, the stakes have never been higher. Transformative technological changes from cloud computing to artificial intelligence are changing the way that businesses interact with customers — and in turn, changing the way customers expect to interact with businesses.
The rise of virtual assistants, user-friendly mobile apps, and breakneck speeds of e-commerce have raised customer expectations across industries. In response, enterprises must scramble to find new ways to stay competitive and meet customer demands, putting pressure on large-scale enterprise technology projects.
According to recent research by Forrester, 77% of surveyed businesses reported that the number and scale of technology projects have increased in recent years. But the same report also found that 35% of enterprise projects are failing to meet original business intent, 38% are failing to meet initial timelines, and 34% are failing to finish within budget. When you focus on large-scale enterprise tech projects, these statistics become even more alarming — 93% of enterprise IT projects with budgets over $10 million fail to deliver value. So why is this happening, how does it affect business, and most importantly, how can enterprises ensure these projects succeed?
An Enterprise Game of Telephone
Part of the low success rate of enterprise tech projects has to do with the sheer number of approval steps an idea has to pass through to survive. Between ideation and development, an idea has to go through strategy and business plans, high-level process flows, socialization within the organization, and a bidding process between lines of business to secure an adequate budget.
As team members try to solicit input to earn maximum organizational buy-in, ideas change to fit the needs of each department that weighs in. By the time it even gets to the project management phases, the idea has likely been chipped away at so much that the original intent may not even be recognizable. In other words, it’s like an enterprise-wide game of telephone.
Not only does this game of telephone morph the idea and take the project further away from the problem it was intended to solve, it also simply slows everything down. These delays make a big difference for enterprise tech projects — the longer a project is scheduled to last, the more likely it is that it will run behind schedule and over budget. In fact, every additional year spent on the project directly increases cost overruns by 15%. On average, large IT projects run 45% over budget and 7% over time, all while delivering 56% less value than expected.
The costs that enterprises incur from these obstacles are high. When asked how project failure affected their organization in the previously mentioned Forrester report, 50% of enterprises noted lost revenue, 42% mentioned an inability to meet business requirements on time, and 42% cited lower customer satisfaction, among other effects.
Finally, these long development times also mean that there are more opportunities for workplace churn to affect the project. The longer a project drags on, the more likely its original team members will move on, taking historical knowledge of the project with them. This further contributes to the fact that the initial idea will inevitably morph along the way as it passes through more hands within the company.
How No-Code Can Help
In today’s demanding market, enterprises need the opposite of a game of telephone — the process needs to deliver value as quickly and reliably as possible. Given this reality, accelerating the application development process is crucial. With the pressure mounting for enterprises to get application development right, firms are looking to a new option: no-code application platforms.
By taking coding out of the process entirely, no code-platforms not only make application development cheaper and faster, they also mean that teams can get closer to the core of the initial idea. Simplifying the development aspect means removing some of the elements of distraction that chip away at the initial idea, allowing teams to focus on the true value add of the application.
Enterprises can no longer afford to wait months — or even years — for enterprise-wide technology projects to reach completion, only to realize that they aren’t exactly what they wanted in the first place. It’s time for teams to efficiently create applications that are driven from the initial needs of the organization and their clients from start to finish — all without writing a single line of code.
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