Project Management
If
new IT solutions are deployed the introduction is almost always organized
as a project. A team with members from business and IT works together for
a defined period of time, captures requirements, implements and tests them,
trains the users and finally goes live with the new system. A project manager
coordinates the work and takes care that the three main objectices - costs,
timeline and quality are met according to the agreements made with the
project orderer.
Main attention is often paid to the things which can easily be measured and which are visible to others- costs and timeline. Things like quality are more elusive. A dangerous practice is to sacrifice quality in order to compensate cost or time overruns. The quality I am talking about includes scope of functionality as well. As bad quality is associated with costs that often first materialize after the project is over it is first of all in the interest of the project orderer to clearly specify the quality criteria that shall be applied. It can help here to show how good quality looks like instead of just describing it verbosely.
Over the last years many standards for project management have been developed - PMI or PRINCE2 to name two prominent examples. These standards and further tools should actually be sufficient to make projects a success. But the number of projects which fall short on one or all of the objectives mentioned before is still high. Reasons for this are manifold. In the information section I have listed references under Project Management where you can find more details.
Although
models like PRINCE2 are calling a project successful if the success is
measured e.g. 6 month after Go Live this is hardly matching with reality.
A project is regarded as success if the above mentioned criteria are met
and the system runs stable. But this is not sufficient for measuring success.
For this, also the users
must have a good understanding of the new system and the projected benefits
must materialize. This is usually only the case if training continues
after Go Live and processes are continuously improved, e.g according to
KAIZEN principles. Taking this into account it becomes clear why two companies
who are using the same
"ingredients" in their project, e.g. SAP + PMI, can have
completely different views when checking if the outcome of the project
was a success.
Appended you can find details for the service Project Management. Depending on the situation your project is in the service includes different offerings for tasks and roles in a project. But all offerings refer to the "Management" aspect.
Service
Description "Project Management"