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Effective project management efforts have business goals attached

By Michael C. Nollet, TechRepublic on March 7, 2003

Summary

With fewer resources for project management leaders or offices and more pressure to make projects meet business strategies, CIOs should reaffirm their project management skills. Make sure all projects are tied to an enterprise goal.

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Project management, especially within small to mid-size enterprises, often is left to the CIO or VP of IS because IT budgets don’t allow for project management leaders or full-blown project management offices. That may mean project management doesn’t get the attention it deserves. In some situations, CIOs don’t realize that project management efforts in their companies need improvement to be effective. To identify whether project management needs attention to reach its full benefit potential in your organization, answer the following questions:
  • Does your project portfolio for 2003 look a lot like the 2002 project portfolio?
  • Are you balancing too many projects?
  • Are new project requests springing up every day?
  • Do you lack confidence about dates and costs for your existing projects?

If any of those questions draws a yes, it’s a good time to review the “basics” of project management and get control of the new projects for this year.

This is the BASIC information CIOs need to gather and implement:
  • Business case
  • Assign responsibility
  • Success metrics
  • Impact on other projects
  • Communication

Understanding the business case
An IT project should be a solution to a business problem. The technology deliverables may only be a partial solution, requiring other changes within the organization to be successful. The project will help to increase revenue, lower costs, improve quality, or meet a similar performance metric.

At a minimum, the business case should:
  • State the problem to be solved.
  • Calculate the value of solving the problem, or the cost of ignoring it.
  • Describe the solution to the problem.
  • Include estimates of the budget, resources, and time required to complete the project.
  • Identify the customer—the manager of the business unit that will receive the product or service produced by the project team.
  • Identify the sponsor—the person or organization paying for the project.

Assigning responsibility
A project is an investment in the business and is designed to produce a return. We almost always assign a project manager, and expect him or her to carefully manage the cost and schedule of the project.

When was the last time you, or your organization, assigned a senior business executive the responsibility of achieving the expected benefits of a project? This seldom happens. More often than not, companies spend large amounts of money and time on a project, and never measure whether they received the desired benefits.

The executive assigned responsibility for the benefits of the project should be in the business unit that derives the benefits, and of sufficient rank that the benefits can be written into his or her performance goals.

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