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Vol. XI Issue III - March 2009
Project Management eJournal
How to Successfully Execute IT Projects
By Curt Finch, CEO, Journyx
and
Bruce McGraw, CEO, Cognitive Technologies
According to a 2008 Gartner report, 15% of all IT projects failed that year because of high cost variance, while 18% were unsuccessful because they were substantially late. This means that in 2008, 1 in 3 technology projects failed. Why such a dismal success rate? Such projects primarily involve the management of human resources in order to accomplish the target schedule, cost, and quality, so it is safe to assume that poor resource management played a large role. Unfortunately, without effective resource management processes, such organizations are left asking questions like:
- “Who is working on what?”
- “How do I get this project back on schedule?”
- “How much more work will it take to finish?”
The Problem with IT Projects Today
Resource Management
IT project teams are made up of knowledge workers who are categorized by skill types or job functions. For example, a project team might require business analysts, developers, team leads, project managers, architects, or database analysts. Finding the right person to assign to a project or task can be the most challenging problem confronting the organization. Typically, quality staff is scarce and therefore heavily sought by competing projects. Without resource management processes, the organization struggles with allocation of its staff across projects.
Project Management
In addition, project managers are responsible for keeping scope, budget, and schedules on track. How can project managers achieve this when they don’t know how many hours it takes to accomplish a task, or how many hours remain in the project? Without an effective system in place, project managers must constantly intrude on team members to get estimates. Likewise, the management team is always asking for status reports and accurate information on projects so that they can make critical decisions. Of course, the project manager is always the last to know when one of his or her critical resources has been magically “re-assigned” to another high profile project! In the words of a famous song, many project managers are “stitched up, out of their mind, feeling strung out, lagging behind, trapped in, can’t do a thing because they’re locked down….”
Read Complete PM Tips & Techniques Paper >>
About the Authors
Curt Finch is the CEO of Journyx (http://pr.journyx.com), a provider of Web-based software located in Austin, Texas, that tracks time and project accounting solutions to guide customers to per-person, per-project profitability. Journyx has thousands of customers worldwide and is the first and only company to establish Per Person/Per Project Profitability (P5), a proprietary process that enables customers to gather and analyze information to discover profit opportunities. In 1997, Curt created the world’s first Internet-based timesheet application - the foundation for the current Journyx product offering. Curt is an avid speaker and author, and recently published the book “All Your Money Won’t Another Minute Buy: Valuing Time as a Business Resource”.
Bruce A. McGraw is the CEO of Cognitive Technologies (www.cogtechinc.com), a professional services firm delivering project and program management services, products, and PMO tool implementation to commercial and government clients. Mr. McGraw holds an MS in Technology Management from the University of Maryland's University College and a BS in Business Administration from the University of South Carolina. Mr. McGraw is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and is an active member of the Project Management Institute. He has trained in four project management methodologies, has authored numerous articles, and presented workshops in a variety of topics, including managing virtual project teams.
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