According to a recent Computerworld poll, it's going to be a tough year for IT project managers. Project management has always earned a high ranking on the annual list of IT managers' worries, but in the first-half of the 2008 Vital Signs survey, it took the No. 1 spot.
IT managers cite a variety of reasons for their escalating concern, including growing globalization, IT budget increases, budget decreases, an overall increase in the complexity of projects, and end users who are simply demanding more.
But the good news, a number of them say, is that they have found strategies and tactics for dealing with the age-old difficulty of bringing in projects on time and within budget while keeping end-user complaints under control.
The loosening of the IT purse strings that began a couple of years ago will continue to be a double-edged sword in 2008. "Budgets lag reality in IT," says Paul Glen, an IT management consultant and a Computerworld columnist. "You have a couple of bad years, and suddenly IT stops doing projects. Now we are a year or two into doing projects again, and we are suddenly realizing, 'Oh, these aren't going so well.'"
And Gopal Kapur, president of the Center for Project Management in San Ramon, Calif., says companies have pretty much picked the low-hanging IT fruit and are starting on bigger, more complex projects.
"Bigger projects carry higher risk," he points out. "The absolute complexity is higher, but the absolute skills are not higher, so the gap is large. You can't pick the higher fruit if your ladder is not strong."
John Bruggeman, IT director at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, has a short ladder. He might be counted among the lucky for having recently received several large gifts earmarked for IT projects, but the gifts didn't provide for the hiring of additional staffers to do the projects.
The initiatives include implementation of a large student information system (SIS), a facility renovation that includes IT infrastructure upgrades, and deployment of classroom videoconferencing across four campuses. "I've been in maintenance mode the past five years," Bruggeman says, "and to have these three big projects tossed on the plate has really created a time crunch."
When you have more money than people, look to vendors to help out, especially with project management, Bruggeman suggests. He says he received two bids for the SIS. One came from a vendor that verbally promised to manage the project but subsequently refused to put that promise into the contract. The winning vendor was willing to guarantee that it would manage the project - and didn't even charge extra for the service, he says.
Deconstructing Global Projects
Increased globalization is contributing to the complexity of projects and of project management, says Mark Showers, CIO at St. Louis-based Monsanto Co. "We have finally gotten away from doing a lot of silo projects," he says. "For example, Monsanto is on a single instance of SAP, and you typically have people from all around the world working on a project."
For large projects - typically, more than US$5 million - that are geographically distributed, the $8.5 billion agricultural biotechnology firm has found a project management innovation that Showers calls "three-headed leadership." The troika consists of a business manager from the country, acquired firm or business unit that will be the primary user of a new system; an enterprise corporate manager from Monsanto's St. Louis headquarters; and an IT manager associated with the user country, acquisition or business unit.
The arrangement brings more leadership to bear and more "ownership - more skin in the game," Showers says. He says it reflects a realization that "IT projects" are rarely only about IT anymore. "Projects rarely fail because of technology," he notes.
As CIO at Wall Homes Inc. in Arlington, Texas, Andrew Brimberry has to stretch a lean staff. He says one way to streamline internal communication and take some of the burden off of project managers at the small, recently formed home construction firm is to have programmers sit in on requirements definition meetings with end users.
Continued: Managing projects on a budget
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