Reducing staff turnover is another key, whether through excellent leadership and management practices, competitive compensation packages, career advancement opportunities, etc. Once the IT project has been completed, it must be tested thoroughly before being deployed. That way, the defects can be resolved before the company begins relying on the project for production work. However, IT staff often scrimp on testing. It is expensive to create a proper test plan, and it is expensive and time consuming to conduct the testing.
Thorough testing is usually one of the first casualties of deadline or budget pressures.
When an IT solution is not tested properly, it will usually have serious defects or will not perform adequately when placed under a full operating load. These problems will wreak havoc in a production environment, often bringing work to a complete halt. The problems must then be fixed by the IT staff. In some rare cases, the performance of new software or a new network architecture will be so poor that it ends up being less expensive to discard the entire project and start from scratch than to repair the defects. Thorough testing should be built into every project budget.