Chapter 14 - Managing Projects

Project management activities include assessing the risk, planning the work, acquiring resources required to accomplish the task, estimating, organizing the work, directing execution and analyzing the results.  Project management must also deal with  major variables: scope, cost, quality, time and risk.  Excelling in project management is crucial for ensuring the logistics of managing systems are carried out timely and efficiently.

It is crucial that organizations have an information systems plan that explains how information technology supports the attainment of their business documents and goals all their system applications and IT infrastructure components.  Most large companies have a management structure that ensures that the important systems receive priority.  Some of the methods that can be used to select and evaluate are portfolio analysis, critical success factor and scoring models.

A company can assess the value of information systems projects by calculating its costs and benefits.  Intangible benefits cannot be immediately quantified and tangible benefits are quantifiable.  Any benefit that exceed costs should be analyzed using capital budgeting methods to ensure a project has a good return on invested capital.

The principal risk factors in information systems projects are determined by project size, project structure and experience with technology.  Whenever there is a lack of user participation, lack of management support and poor management of the implementation of the project; the chances of failure are increased. Projects that involve business process re engineering, mergers and acquisitions and enterprise applications have the highest failure rate, because they require the largest amount of organizational change.


Some strategies useful for managing project risk and system implementation are implementation, user support and involvement, control of the implementation process and mechanisms for dealing with the level of risk in each new systems project.  The contingency approach to project management can help control the situation better than most other means of doing so.  The risk level of each project is what determines the appropriate mix of external and internal integration tools, formal planning tools and formal control tools that are applied.