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The End of IT Project Management as We Know It
By Michelle Savage

June 25, 2008 — 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.

"For example, in financial services, an organization that has the best IT system has a competitive differentiator over the competition. Organizations that think about IT more strategically have much closer alignment and insight into what’s happening with IT and that translates into better project management, as well.”

Schmelzer avoids the word “alignment” because it implies that IT and the business are separate. “IT is part of the business,” he said. “Technology is one of the most important resources a business has. So the question is not how do we align IT with the business, but rather how do we make IT part of the business? When businesses plan, they can’t just say, ‘We’ll plan this business thing and then talk to IT.’ You have to plan with IT, money and people in mind.”

Unfortunately, many companies continue to treat IT more as a service-oriented unit that supports the business, said Troester. “Then you get into more argumentative situations where the business feels IT is not delivering what it needs,” he said. “There’s no cohesion between the business and IT.”

To address this challenge, Schmelzer recommends a new approach to project management—one that incorporates EA, SOA and PPM.

“The best way to do EA is to do portfolio-management style of IT project management; to budget according to the portfolio versus the project; to do a service-oriented architecture for the parts of the enterprise architecture that change frequently; to do traditional IT project management for the parts of IT that don’t change frequently; and to basically make sure you have a clear separation between the portfolio for the enterprise and for the discrete projects that are not part of that portfolio,” he said. “Then you can do IT systems management and all the other things we do to manage the underlying resources.”

For example, from a business point of view, DataDirect’s customers are trying to make their organizations more agile to meet fast-changing market demands.

“If they have IT systems that are static and can’t be easily implemented, they can’t move quickly,” said Troester. “EA and SOA make things reusable, and business processes can be composed on the fly. People also have a heterogeneous mix of technologies—it’s rare that we go in and find that companies have strictly a Microsoft shop these days. The promise of SOA is that it puts a service-oriented architecture on all of those things and allows companies to be more productive and produce applications more quickly.”

This approach requires a major change in budgeting and management. All businesses need to manage four resources: money, people, technology and supplies, said Schmelzer. These things are all equally important assets, he said, so it doesn’t make sense that IT should be managed differently than finance or human resources.

“The whole budgeting approach to IT is fundamentally flawed,” he said. “Most companies fund IT on a project by project basis. IT guesses how long something will take and how much it will cost and, of course, it’s always over budget and late. And that’s because you’re not budgeting properly. HR is given a flat and continuous budget that covers all the people hired into the organization. That’s the way IT needs to be treated.”

However, according to Schmelzer, many companies are reluctant to change the way they do IT projects because it requires a major change to the business.

“Most businesses don’t know how to think that way,” he said. “We get a lot of pushback. But when you look at companies who have made the switch, it makes sense. They don’t have IT projects that are over budget, no predictability, too much duplication. It will take time because it requires a fundamental change to the business. From 1950 to 2000, businesses focused on new technology. Now they have most of the assets and technologies they need, and need to support the investments they’ve already made.”

Randy Heffner, vice president principal analyst at Forrester Research, said many organizations complain about SOA because it creates dependencies on other teams’ work.

“It’s hard to manage all these dependencies—SOA will fall apart if you don’t manage these dependencies. But they don’t realize that this is the right set of problems to have versus dealing with multiple implementations of the same business logic and how to manage them while staying consistent. This results in poor insight into business operations and what’s happening in the business. You can’t look at SOA as something that’s creating a set of problems. Rather, you’re changing your set of problems to be the right set of problems. Figuring out how to do business in a consistent way and ensure compliance and governance in a consistent way is the right set of problems to have.”

Despite these challenges, Miko Matsumura, deputy CTO at Software AG and vice president of SOA products at webMethods, said that more and more companies are on board with the SOA and EA approach. “It’s easy to find people who like this approach because it’s designed to be sensible. There are plenty of ways to get value out of it,” said Matsumura. “Everything IT does can be seen from the perspective of attractive trends. Once you “get it” it’s easy to understand how it can help. It’s an idea that involves just changing your perspective.”

Matsumura believes EA and SOA are an easy sell because they solve one of the biggest problems in enterprises—business and IT alignment. “One of the things we see happening in IT is the waxy buildup—this history of IT built up over a long period of time,” he said. “Every system is complex and every component is there for a reason. The result is that you end up with systems that are hard to adapt, modify and change. This is a way of characterizing disease or illness. SOA treats the symptom—the fact that people look at IT with suspicion. They end up waiting, getting irritated, and not getting what they want because the process is flawed.”

According to Schmelzer, EA and SOA may shake things up in the business because, rather than address a discrete problem or set of problems in the enterprise, EA and SOA attempt to address a range of interconnected and perplexing issues that challenge IT.

“Specifically, SOA approaches to EA address long-term issues of integration in environments of continued heterogeneity, application development in the face of continuous change, governance, management, and quality in environments of continuous complexity, increasing reuse and reducing redundancy across multiple IT initiatives, and organizational and methodology approaches that favor iteration over monolithic, waterfall-style approaches to development,” he said.

These challenges have long plagued IT, and many companies have many tools and techniques to deal with them. The EA approach is different in that it attempts to address them in a holistic manner, maintaining a consistent approach as the business constantly changes. “One of the biggest impacts of this holistic approach to IT management is that discrete IT project management is rapidly going by the wayside,” Schmelzer said.

But this doesn’t mean that IT project management is dead, said experts. “SOA or EA may change the nature of the size of projects but it won’t replace project management,” said Heffner. “We need to carve off a group of things that need to be done and get them done. The disciplines of project management are still important and necessary. We may be able to do a higher number of smaller projects because we can incrementally deliver on a project portfolio.”

Schmelzer agreed that EA, SOA or PPM will not replace discrete IT management, but he believes that they will fuel changes to the technology and application development approach, as well as in the way in which we manage the organization’s overall evolution. “It’s not that project management is a failure or that we need better project managers,” he said. “The whole idea is that you’re managing a complex system of continuously changing parts. The question is, can we have a better approach to managing the enterprise as a whole rather than just managing everything as a discrete project?”

EA, PPM and SOA: How Do They Fit Together?
EA, PPM and SOA are critical to the success of IT project management. So what’s the difference between these things and how do they tie into one another?

According to IBM, EA is a discipline that “defines and maintains the architecture models, governance and transition initiatives needed to effectively co-ordinate semi-autonomous groups towards common business and/or IT goals.” The goal of EA is to break down information silos and allow information to flow between the business units and business processes.

IBM defines SOA as “an enterprise-scale IT architecture for linking resources on demand. These resources are represented as business-aligned services, which can participate and be composed in a value-net, enterprise or line of business to fulfill business needs. The primary structuring element for SOA applications is a service as opposed to subsystems, systems, or components.”

PPM ensures that the company focuses its assets (money, people, assets and technology) on initiatives that align with business strategies. If a company has everyone working on the right projects (including IT), the next logical step is to focus architecture on the projects that have greatest value. At this point, the architecture team can align with the business to maximize the value of SOA.

Miko Matsumura, deputy CTO at Software AG and vice president of SOA products at webMethods, said that all three are closely tied together.

“Portfolio management comes from the business domain and answers the question of how you should invest,” he said. “SOA comes from architectural domain and answers how you should organize. EA is a discipline, like investment management. SOA is one tool of EA and happens to be the one in vogue right now. EA is looking at everything and figuring out how can this be more organized and utilized better. There’s a strong link between SOA and EA. It’s sort of like EA is the job description and SOA is the toolbox. SOA fits with portfolio management in that if you organize in a service-oriented way, it allows you to manage in a portfolio-oriented way.”

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

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