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ABC: An Introduction to IT Project Management

Only 29 percent of IT projects are completed on time and on budget. Here's some advice on how to improve your odds.

By Joseph Phillips

PAGE 4

• What are the basic principles of IT project management?
• Why do IT projects fail so often?
• How do I determine if a project is going to fail once it's in motion?
• When should a project be canceled?
• How can I ensure that my projects are successful?
• What are some common project-management methodologies, and which work best for various kinds of IT projects?
• Some companies have project-management offices. What's their purpose, and should I create one?
• How much authority should a project manager have?
• What certifications are available for project managers, and are they important?
• Our business moves very fast while our projects seem to move slowly. What strategies can we use to get our projects up to speed?
• Regulations, laws and standards are common in my industry. How will they impact my IT projects?
• I want to send my project managers through project-management training. What should I make sure they get out of it, and how do I know the training will be worthwhile?

Some companies have project-management offices. What's their purpose, and should I create one?

Many companies have adopted a project-management office (PMO) to centralize and coordinate all project-management activities, including IT, across a company. PMOs establish ground rules and expectations around how projects should be conducted for the project manager, the project team and the stakeholders. PMOs corral requests for changes to the scope of a project and provide training, tracking software, project plan templates and process forms to the project manager and the project team to help ensure that projects proceed smoothly and conclude successfully. In some companies, PMOs prioritize which projects are going to get done and when. They also say which resources will work on which projects to prevent departments from fighting over resources.

A well-rounded PMO is often led by a well-versed and experienced project manager and is staffed with support personnel who relieve the manager of busy work (keeping minutes from meetings, coordinating project records, communications and meeting with stakeholders.)

PMOs can exist inside or outside of IT departments. Some companies like to have one uber-PMO for all projects (whether they're IT initiatives, research and development efforts or new product launches) that's independent of all of those departments. Project managers typically report into PMOs. Dedicated project managers are often part of the PMO's staff, but employees who are named project manager for a given initiative are not usually part of the PMO's staff because they have some other day-to-day responsibility in addition to their newfound project-management responsibility.

The bad news about PMOs is that they can stifle project managers' leadership and management styles by dictating the methodologies project managers must use and by making them follow specific (and often tedious) procedures for documenting work.

How much authority should a project manager have?

Project managers need to be able to dictate the resources they need to complete a project successfully. If they don't have the authority to make the decisions about staffing, processes and methodologies that affect a project's success, their hands are essentially tied. By the same token, you don't want to give authority to an ineffective project manager.

Generally, the more experience a person has as a project manager, the more autonomy that project manager can expect. While this varies from organization to organization, the power structure within an organization often dictates the project manager's authority.

 

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