Over-budget IT projects present complex challenges. Significant investments in hardware, software, development, and integration during the project life make failure costly, and increase pressure for success. Here are some ideas on how to save the day rather than throw in the towel.
Things are taking too long. Bugs, integration difficulties, and the associated additional time and effort are piling up. Suddenly, it's very clear that not only are you over budget, but that you're only going to be more over budget as time goes on. Usually you know after the planning and design stages what the fixed costs for hardware, software, licenses, & support were. So, what happened? Perhaps estimates for development time were inaccurate. Or you were working with incomplete information on a new API, and integration is more complex than anticipated. Perhaps some features don't work as expected, and the vendor is having problems resolving the issues. Any of these, or a combination of them could head your project into the red.
Now you need to decide how to proceed. In some cases the best choice is simply to forge ahead and finish according to the original plan. But that's not creative, innovative, and you probably didn't need my help for that choice. Let's look at some other options:
Pick Your Battles to Reach a Goal
If it's clear that some features or functions just aren't likely to work out in this phase without large further expenditure, but other things will work out as expected; cut your losses and relegate the problems to a later phase and reevaluate the costs for those.
Get Something Finished
It's better to accomplish something, rather than nothing. It may be clear that it just doesn't make sense to try to get everything done that was originally planned. Determine whether there are parts of the project that have their own merit on completion, separate from the project as a whole. If those parts are almost complete, finish them.
Get It Operational
Proof that the parts that are finished work and work as promised can count for a lot. If a subset of the project can be taken through into beta, testing, or even production--that's a win. Now that you know what the problems are, the next phase and/or round of budgeting can be adjusted for that. You've demonstrated that the core investment and effort is sound.
I often find that in the planning stage, it's good to examine areas that would be "quick wins" if the project ended at any particular point. It has also proven extremely valuable to divide the project into smaller phases during planning, even if budgeting covers several of those phases together. Be careful with estimates based on promises of development time with new technology. When dealing with "new" anything, you're going to have "new" problems.
For more information on IT-specific project problems, check out my article on Planning For Problems In IT Projects.