The End of IT Project Management as We Know It

By Michelle Savage

June 25, 2008 —  (Page 1 of 6)
Is traditional IT project management in the line of fire due to increasing demands for IT/business alignment? Experts say enterprise architecture (EA), service-oriented architecture (SOA) and project portfolio management (PPM) are driving major project management changes.

As IT evolves from a cost center to a strategic business unit, greater control over IT project selection, execution and status are increasingly important. Traditional or discrete IT project management, in which requirements and budget are determined as if an IT project has no interaction with any of the other projects and resources in the company, is no longer effective, and it is the source of blame as IT projects continuously go over time and budget.

If you work in IT, you’re probably aware that most corporate IT environments are complex. Even if a company has a small number of systems and application, their interconnections, customizations and dependencies quickly evolve into a morass of complexity that ZapThink managing partner Ronald Schmelzer refers to as the “IT rat’s nest.”  

This nest continues to grow in complexity as the business continues to impose new demands and requirements, resulting in even more IT resources, interconnections, customizations and dependencies. Eventually, if you make a change to one part of the environment, such as a data schema change, that change effects the entire organization. “Like a game of pick-up-sticks, nothing can move without moving the whole pile,” said Schmelzer.

However, most businesses continue to manage IT projects in a discrete fashion, meaning that costs and resource schedules are determined on a project-by-project basis. While Schmelzer said that this approach might work for some companies, most companies need to apply EA to align the entire organization into a “predictable, composable, governed, loosely coupled and potentially reusable set of assets.” To do so, he believes that companies need to stop doing discrete IT project management and start treating IT as a continuously evolving asset.

Mark Troester, director of product marketing for DataDirect, sees many companies struggling with a process in which projects get delivered but don’t meet the needs or timelines of the business. “The companies that do a better job are organizations that treat IT as a business differentiator,” he said.

Related Search Term(s): ITIL, SOA & SaaS, software development

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