The Top 3 Causes of Fundraising IT Project Failure (and 5 Ways to Manage Change)

The best way to manage that is to meticulously watch the budget and timeliness. Make it a priority to meet deadlines and manage costs.

2. Ineffective management of stakeholders. Everyone must be on board, from buy-in at the top to the users all way down the chain. Know the stakeholders and communicate with them often so everyone is on the same page.

3. Insufficient attention to risk management during the project. "Risk management is something that you do not just do at the beginning of the project, but throughout it," Wilkinson said.

Never stop asking what might go wrong, and continuously assess risks along the way.

How can you manage change?
"During a project, things are going to come at you from all different directions. Some people will not be available you hoped would be. Something is harder than anticipated. You might have changes in personnel," Wilkinson said. "Key to a successful IT project is to be ready for changes and have a good way to manage them. Don't fight them. Expect them, but find a way to make sure they don't derail your efforts."

He shared these five ways to manage change during a fundraising IT project.

1. Get executives engaged, not just involved.
2. Seek project leaders with specific, relevant experience supported by a decisive team. "You need someone who as been through to something like this before," Wilkinson said. "If you're all doing it for the first time, chances are you'll run into more problems you can't solve. On the other hand, you also need that person to be supported by a team that's willing to make decisions because there are a lot decisions that come up and must be made. You need to make decisions to move forward."
3. Use third parties to fill gaps, and capture their knowledge. "Where you have gaps in expertise, you can rely on third parties — Raiser's Edge, Tessitura, Google Apps, Microsoft. But don't just let them do the job and walk away. Have a strategy for capturing what they know and what they did so that knowledge remains within your organization," Wilkinson said. "Make them show you how they did it so you know how to do it."
4. Expect change, and manage it conscientiously.
5. Satisficing works — perfect is the enemy of good. The term satisficing originally came from Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist Herbert Simon. It means finding satisfactory solutions, something that fits pretty well, rather than searching for the perect solution. "If you want to get something exactly the way you want it and nothing else will do, chances are you're going to get stuck," Wilkinson said.