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Prioritizing IT Projects Increases Productivity

After years in I.T., Niel Nickolaisen believes IT projects fail in such high percentages because both IT and business executives ...

 

March 15, 2004CIO

After years in I.T., Niel Nickolaisen believes IT projects fail in such high percentages because both IT and business executives spend too much time and energy debating systems that ultimately don’t generate a single dollar of ROI or the slightest increase in market share. And then they devote too many resources to developing technology to support those projects.

Nickolaisen joined Deseret Book, a book publisher, distributor and retailer based in Salt Lake City, as its first ever CIO in March 2003. He found an IT department in chaos. "They had a highly customized homegrown system. The IT development staff spent its time responding to every imaginable request," Nickolaisen says. "They didn’t have a CIO, IT reported to finance, and there were business processes embedded in their legacy systems that actually got in the way of people getting things done." So Nickolaisen, who was then a business turnaround specialist at a venture capital firm, was brought in to overhaul Deseret Book’s 20-year-old technology infrastructure and bring order to a random IT project prioritization process.

The goals of his approach are to help Deseret Book make more effective IT project decisions and to bring a sharper focus and rigid analysis to IT project decision making. This method helps Nickolaisen and his executive colleagues identify business priorities around each decision and allocate the appropriate amount of resources?staffing, capital investment and time?to each project. By prioritizing and classifying these decisions, the CIO and business unit leaders can examine them more objectively. They avoid squandering intellectual and financial capital on processes that, while important to the business, would not help the company generate additional revenue or secure greater market share.

Using this mode of classifying projects has yielded tangible benefits, according to Nickolaisen and has greatly simplified the company’s project strategy. He estimates that using this decision model has reduced IT project time lines, costs and resource requirements by 40 percent to 70 percent.

Rewriting the Rules

One of the first major processes that Nickolaisen classified with his model was a project overhauling the Deseret Book system for shipping customer orders. The rules the company had encoded into its legacy systems for shipping products exemplifies the ad hoc manner in which the company had historically made IT and process decisions. Besides its 36 retail stores in the western United States, Deseret Book sells directly to customers through three channels: catalog orders, Internet orders and its book club. Since those three channels evolved at different times, each channel used different shipping rules and fees.

 
 
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WHITE PAPERS

Top 10 Habits of Highly Effective PMOs

This white paper outlines the top ten habits necessary to make your PMO more effective and maximize its benefit to your organization.
 

Why an Enterprise Project Portfolio Management, EPPM

Beyond traditional project portfolio management, Primavera P6 EPPM improves visibility into every aspect of the project manufacturing process.
 

Does Your Organization Need a Project Management Office?

Read this paper to find out if a Project Management Office (PMO) could be your solution.
 

Making Earned Value Management Work for Every Project

Earned Value Management (EVM) allows you to predict your project results within 15-20% of completion, in time to make a difference.
 

Project Management Office Best Practices

Once best practice basics are in place, the PMO has demonstrated improvement in project delivery and the office has gained credibility.
 

Automate and Accelerate with Project Management

This white paper asserts that the common thread that must run through all phases of project manufacturing is a Project Portfolio Management (PPM) system.
 

WEBCASTS

The Case for Data Protection for SMBs

Every business needs a data back-up and recovery strategy. Without it, a severe storm or power outage could result ...
 

Enterprise Capture: Your Onramp to Business Process Automation

Date: Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Time: 11:00 AM PT/2:00 PM ET

Today more than ever companies are see...
 

Enhance SAP

New research from AMR shows that SAP environments can be dramatically more efficient with the addition of document ...
 

Beyond Installing ITPM Software: How a global company reduced risk and successfully implemented ITPM

Live Webcast: November 11, 2009
1:00 PM EST

Hear directly from one of your peers who has reduced risk...
 

The Last Software You'll Ever Buy? The CRM Platform as Development Platform

Join Stan Gibson the principal of Stan Gibson Communications and CDC Software's Scott Munro for an engaging discuss...
 

Real World Performance: More Than Just Benchmarks

Real World Performance: More Than Just Benchmarks
 

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