Chapter 11 IT Project Management
Chapter 11
IT Project Management
Objectives and Overview
capability for not only IT projects, but business projects in general. A major assumption of this
traditional measures of on-time, within budget projects that deliver a high quality IT solution that
Early in this chapter, the roles of not only the project manager, but the key business manager
roles as project sponsor and project champion are discussed. The latter roles are especially
important for IT projects in which close collaboration is required between IT and business
managers not just at the outset of the project, but throughout the project phases.
Many IT projects involve technologies new to the organization, as well as emerging technologies
for which there may be minimal consultant or vendor expertise available for hire. Good
The degree of complexity of a given IT project is also associated with greater risk for failure, and
some guidelines for managing mega-projects are provided in a special section at the end of the
chapter. We also address the special issue of managing virtual teams, which is increasingly
common for IT project work today. Guidelines for managing teams with offshore workers are
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Specific learning objectives for this chapter include:
Awareness of the distinction between IT project management and IT portfolio management.
Teaching Suggestions
A large number of the case studies in this textbook provide real-world examples of IT projects.
These cases can be used to highlight the project management challenges that arise with projects to
Case Study III-7, A Troubled Project at Modern Materials describes a situation where an
Case Study III-8, Purchasing and Implementing a Student Management System at
Jefferson County School System demonstrates the ramifications of not having good business
sponsor and champion roles to help achieve buy-in across an organization.
The trade press has made clear that enterprise system implementations can be very complex, and
many companies have had difficulty managing them. This edition of the textbook has several
examples of initial enterprise system projects that were well managed:
Case Study III- describes in detail a
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Case Study III-1, Managing a Systems Development Project at Consumer and Industrial
Products, Inc.
Case Study III-2, A Make-or-Buy Decision at Baxter Manufacturing Company
Case Study III-3, ERP Purchase Decision at Benton
Open source projects also create some new types of IT project management challenges, especially
when multiple adopting organizations are involved. These types of challenges are described in:
Case Study III-4, The Kuali Financial System: An Open Source Project
Two case studies that follow the Part IV chapters also describe IT project management dilemmas
Case Study IV-2, Fast Track IT Integration for the Sallie Mae Merger
Case Study IV-6, The Challenges of Local System Design for Multinationals: The MaxFli
Sales Force Automation System at BAT
Review Questions
1. Describe the difference between project management and program management.
Within an IT project context, project management is the application of methodologies (e.g. the
2. What is a PMO and why have many organizations implemented one?
A Program Management Office (PMO) is an organizational unit with full-time personnel to
provide a full range of standard approaches to project management support and services that are
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3. What managers are involved in managing an IT portfolio, and why?
Organizations have become highly dependent on integrated data for their strategic and operational
4. What information is typically included in an initial IT project request? In a project
charter?
An IT project request usually includes the expected business benefits and both the initial resource
5. What types of skills have been identified as important for successful IT project
managers?
6. What are the business manager roles of project sponsor and project champion, and why
are they important?
These two key business manager roles, the project sponsor and the project champion, have been
associated with successfully managed IT projects that involve new software applications.
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7. What is a work breakdown analysis and why is this concept important?
8. Why is timeboxing becoming a common IT project management technique?
9. Contrast the strengths of bottom-up and top-down approaches to project budgeting.
Bottom-up and top-down are the two traditional approaches to estimating project budgets.
A top-down approach (also called parametric cost estimating) eschews the cost details and
provides instead estimates for major budget categories based on historical experience. The top-
10. What are some key issues related to IT project staffing that need to be well managed?
In project work, the human resource is a critical production factor. Project staffing involves
identifying the IT specialist skill mix needed for the project, selecting personnel who collectively
11. Describe the key uses of CPM and Gantt charts.
A CPM (Critical Path Method) chart is an alternative method to the PERT chart. Each major
task is represented as a symbol and lines or arrows are used to show predecessor tasks.
12. Describe one technique used to manage IT project risks.
Sample answer: Risk identification and analysis should be undertaken at the outset of the
13. Describe one technique associated with effectively implementing business change
(change management).
14. Compare and contrast the Lewin/Schein model with the Kotter framework. What is the
same and what is different?
The Lewin/Schein change model is a simple three-stage model for managing changes in
organizations. The unfreezing stage includes two aspects. First, a need for change must be
The Kotter framework is an eight-step framework for leaders of major organizational change
efforts. As presented in the text, the eight steps are:
2. Forming a Powerful Guiding Coalition
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3. Creating a Vision
5. Empowering Others to Act on the Vision
7. Consolidating Improvements and Producing Still More Change
8. Institutionalizing New Approaches
As described in the textbook, the first four steps establish a sense of urgency for change by both
15. Why is the management of large complex system projects an important IT capability?
16. What is a virtual team, and why do IT managers need new approaches for managing
such a team?
A virtual team consists of members working in geographically dispersed locations that generally
cannot meet face-to-face, and therefore are highly dependent on communicating with information
Discussion Questions
1. If a person has been certified by the PMI but has never been on an IT project team,
would you even consider hiring that person to manage an IT project? Justify your answer.
Sample answer: Yes, or maybe no. The match between the characteristics and dynamics of the
project along with the specific skills of the project manager would determine whether or not there
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2. Several approaches for time and budget estimations are provided in this chapter. Why
to improve them?
3. Select an IT project that you are familiar with and comment on whether there was a
formal project sponsor and champion, which business managers played these roles, and
whether or not you think their roles positively affected the project outcomes.
4. Use the Web to identify at least two software products used to support project managers
in general. Briefly contrast their features and costs.
5. Select any project in which you have participated. Describe how well the project budget
and schedule were controlled, and evaluate why you think this outcome occurred.
6. A project monitoring technique called a traffic approach (i.e., red, yellow, and green
lights) is mentioned in the chapter. Comment on what you see as the pros and cons of this
approach.
The red-yellow-green reporting mechanism is the so-
status of a project on a regular basis:
7. A large number of U.S.-based mergers over the past two decades have failed to achieve
the forecasted business benefits of the merger. Develop an argument for why poor IT
project management could contribute to this type of failure.
The business strategy for the merger will partially determine the degree of IT integration that will
8. Not all organizations conduct a formal post-project review. Provide an argument for why
you think organizations should include such a step as part of their project closing.
9. Identify a recent news report about the IT mega-project underway for the NHS in the
United Kingdom. Summarize the issue discussed. Then comment on whether the report
10. Describe which one of the training topics in Figure 11.15 would be most helpful to you,
and why.
[Note: Figure 11.15 lists the following topics.]
Dos: Be proactive, be positive, respect, celebrate success, be compassionate