Enterprise IT projects require participants with relevant experience, specialist knowledge, and professional reliability. However, not all individuals engaged in these projects meet the expectations of their assigned roles. Common issues include limited exposure to complex IT environments, diluted focus from holding multiple roles, and inaccurate claims of competency. These issues must be addressed during onboarding and throughout the project lifecycle to align participants with the roles they are expected to fulfil.

New to Enterprise IT Projects

Participants without enterprise IT project experience often struggle to meet the expectations of specialist roles. Their limited knowledge of structured delivery frameworks, formal governance, and large-scale technical environments creates risks to delivery. Enterprise IT projects involve high-risk implementation across multiple workstreams. Unqualified participants who expect on-the-job learning opportunities or attempt to improvise introduce inconsistency and delay.

Experience in small-scale IT projects can serve as a foundation, but this must be supported by a disciplined understanding of enterprise delivery. Organisations must engage participants with proven experience, role-aligned skills, and clarity of responsibilities prior to onboarding. Ongoing suitability must be reviewed during the project to prevent issues arising from unclear responsibilities or inability to meet delivery expectations.

Multiple Hat Wearers

Some participants attempt to fill several roles—such as project manager, business analyst, developer, and tester—at the same time. While these individuals may bring a breadth of experience, they often lack the depth required to fulfil each role to enterprise standards. Attempting to cover multiple disciplines usually results in poor-quality deliverables, ambiguity in responsibility, and inconsistent alignment with project needs.

Organisations must assign critical roles to dedicated specialists with the relevant depth of expertise. Roles and responsibilities should be defined in detail and monitored for potential overload. Maintaining clear scope for each role supports accountability and enables consistent delivery.

Self-Promoters

In some cases, participants overstate their experience to obtain roles for which they are not qualified. This introduces significant risk, especially when critical roles such as program manager or lead business analyst are misassigned. Individuals from unrelated disciplines or those with insufficient project delivery backgrounds may rely on generic credentials or role inflation to bypass qualification requirements. Performance issues, delivery delays, and confusion about decision-making authority commonly follow.

Formal IT qualifications are a stronger indicator of potential suitability than general business experience. Organisations must verify claims of experience and qualifications before assigning key roles. Clear role definitions and pre-engagement vetting discourage misrepresentation. Regular performance reviews support the early identification of misalignment.

Misaligned Career Progression

Participants in enterprise IT projects often misrepresent career progression, assuming experience in smaller projects or different disciplines qualifies them for specialist roles. This misconception jeopardises delivery when unqualified participants take on responsibilities beyond their expertise.

• Job title versus role seniority: Titles obtained in smaller projects do not automatically qualify an individual for an equivalent enterprise role. For example, a project manager responsible for a single-team application upgrade does not have the scale experience required to manage a multi-stream enterprise implementation. The planning complexity, integration scope, and governance standards differ substantially.
• Cross-discipline transitions: Transitioning between roles—such as from business analyst to project manager—requires retraining, certification, and role-specific experience. Flexibility across disciplines is not equivalent to the capability required to fulfil each distinct function in a large-scale IT environment. 

Organisations must validate career progression claims through qualification checks and enterprise IT experience reviews. Clear role definitions prevent participants from assuming unsuitable positions, ensuring only qualified individuals contribute to large-scale project delivery.

Background

An independent contractor, Ella Vate, works across enterprise and smaller-scale IT projects. She assumes her experience in small projects qualifies her for advanced enterprise roles. Her career progression does not reflect the need for formal qualifications or enterprise-specific expertise. This creates delivery risks on a large-scale project.

Scenario

Ella joins a $5 million enterprise IT project to implement a customer relationship management (CRM) system as a business analyst. She draws on five years of experience from smaller projects, such as a $50,000 inventory app upgrade. She believes this prepares her for enterprise demands. She also aspires to become a project manager but does not pursue PMP certification, assuming her analytical ability is sufficient.

Challenges

Ella struggles to gather requirements across cross-functional teams. Her documentation misses 20% of stakeholder needs, including integration with billing systems. In contrast, Dee Till, a certified business analyst with a CBAP designation and seven years of enterprise experience, delivers comprehensive and accurate specifications.

Ella attempts to influence project management decisions without formal knowledge. She proposes unachievable timelines based on her small-project experience. Her estimates lack PMP-level scheduling insight and introduce confusion. Miles Ahead, the project manager, holds a PMP designation and spends 10% of his time resolving misunderstandings caused by Ella’s advice.

Outcomes

Dee and other analysts dedicate 15% of their time to correct Ella’s outputs. They address data mapping issues that would have caused CRM integration failures. This lowers team efficiency and delays system testing by two weeks. The project incurs $150,000 in rework costs to remediate Ella’s deliverables, contributing to a 10% budget overrun.

Stakeholder confidence declines. The CRM launch is delayed by one month. Ella is excluded from future enterprise roles. Project feedback highlights her lack of formal qualifications and experience in enterprise-scale delivery.

Conclusion

This case study highlights the risks of misaligned career progression in enterprise IT projects. Ella assumes that small-project experience and versatility across roles qualify her for advanced responsibilities. Her assumptions disrupt delivery and damage her professional credibility.

Organisations must verify certifications such as CBAP or PMP and assess participants’ experience in enterprise environments. This protects delivery integrity and supports appropriate professional development.

Ongoing Suitability Assessments

Ongoing evaluations of participant competencies enable alignment between skills and role requirements in enterprise IT projects. Underqualified individuals who fail to meet expectations cause delays, forcing competent team members to compensate for deficiencies, such as correcting errors or filling knowledge gaps. For example, a business analyst lacking expertise in requirements elicitation may produce incomplete specifications, requiring team rework. This strain reduces morale and jeopardises project outcomes.

Regular suitability assessments, conducted through performance reviews and skill audits, identify gaps early. If a participant’s capabilities do not meet role demands, replacing them with a qualified individual maintains project integrity and supports successful delivery.

Background

LuxeStay Hotels engages WiseCrack Consulting to implement a new booking and reservations system using a commercial off-the-shelf solution. This enterprise IT project involves complex integration across legacy systems and carries high stakeholder expectations. The delivery environment requires experienced professionals who can meet the demands of structured frameworks, compliance requirements, and high-volume transactional processing.

WiseCrack Consulting assigns Sarah Sellers, an experienced project manager, to lead the engagement. She proposes a cost-saving measure to the LuxeStay sponsor: instead of hiring one seasoned professional, the project will engage two recent graduates—Tom Newman, with an Information Technology degree, and Jerry Newtown, with a Business Administration degree. Both are new to enterprise IT project delivery and lack any practical experience. Sarah claims their academic background will introduce innovative thinking, supported by her project oversight and the guidance of Eleanor Sharpe, a certified business analyst and independent contractor responsible for requirements analysis and implementation support.

As delivery progresses, the impact of this staffing decision becomes clear.

• Inexperienced graduates on complex tasks: Tom and Jerry are assigned to define user requirements and support integration activities. They are unfamiliar with structured delivery methods, industry compliance, and system integration protocols. Their combined productivity equates to 60% of a competent professional. Key artefacts, such as the requirements traceability matrix and integration specifications, contain gaps that delay testing by three weeks.
• Effect on the business analyst: Eleanor Sharpe spends 30% of her time coaching the graduates and correcting errors, such as inaccurate data mapping that risks integration failure. This reduces the time she can devote to critical outputs, including finalising the requirements baseline and reviewing vendor deliverables, which in turn delays milestones in the build and test phases.
• Consulting profit model: WiseCrack bills Tom and Jerry at a slightly discounted consultant rate of $125 per hour each. The project effectively becomes a subsidised training exercise for unqualified staff, creating a misalignment between client cost and delivery value.
• Impact on LuxeStay: The project incurs a 20% schedule overrun and requires an additional $300,000 to address incomplete or defective deliverables. Rework includes rewriting integration scripts, extending testing cycles, and repeating system validation activities. The system launch is delayed, and stakeholder confidence declines.
• Reputational damage: LuxeStay shares project outcomes across its industry network, highlighting delivery issues and poor-quality outputs. WiseCrack Consulting faces reputational risk as other clients question its resourcing model and delivery reliability. 

Conclusion

This case study highlights the risks of prioritising low-cost resource strategies in enterprise IT projects. Unqualified participants increase delivery effort and reduce output quality, placing pressure on experienced team members and resulting in cost escalations. Project sponsors should require verified professional capability and assess participant suitability continuously to maintain delivery standards and protect project value.