Martin MacLeod touched on some key points in his blog today when he was giving tips on how to manage a VMWare ESX deployment.  His points coincide with many other technology adoption projects, like upgrading to Exchange 2007 or migrating from Notes to Exchange (gasp!!).

His main points were as follows with my comments in the parenthesis:

1. Poor perception (If the users don't have that warm fuzzy feeling whether its valid or not, can really derail a project FAST.  It will also drive up help desk calls and over users reluctance to change.  Sell the deployment, provide plenty of evidence that this is a GOOD thing that they should be excited about.)
2. Not ready for Production (You haven't put the gears in place to make sure that monitoring, backups, and support are in motion)
3. Inadequate planning (You didn't plan for future growth and now you have to go back to the well for more funding or engineering time)
4. Ineffective consolidation/Ineffective deployment (Use the time to do a sanity check on what your migrating and take the time to fix it otherwise the deployment will be blamed even if the problem existed prior to the deployment)
5. Delivery (It is a new platform shouldn't it be better, faster, stronger, you know more betterer?  If so be sure to make sure those improvements are properly)
6. High costs (You may need to get creative in a corporate setting in order to get the budget approved, especially if IT is a viewed as just a cost center)
7. Adoption (Make yourself available to the decision makers and stakeholders, offer to show them how great this new technology is and follow through)