MIS-CH14: Managing Projects

Editor's Notes

• #3: This chapter discusses the role and importance of managing projects. Have students describe why project management is important to information systems projects. Have some students worked on projects (not necessarily IT projects) at work which were poorly managed? How many have worked on well-managed projects? What were the really significant factors that made for a “well-managed” (or “poorly managed”) project?
• #5: This slide emphasizes the high risk of failure for most IT projects and details the main ways a system can be considered to have “failed.” Some studies have shown that only 29 percent of all technology investments are completed on time, on budget, and with all features and functions specified, and nearly 40 percent suffer some kind of failure mode. Ask students what is meant by “Fail to provide organizational benefits” and provide an example.
• #6: This graphic illustrates the main consequences when an information project is not properly managed. Have any students encountered an information system that was too difficult to use or that didn’t work as intended? Have any students experienced a poorly managed project?
• #9: This slide introduces the main activities involved in project management, and lists the five major variables that project management must deal with. Ask students to describe what “scope” means. You can also ask students what project management activities concern the five variables. For example, to control scope, project managers define the work as included in the project. To manage the time spent on the project, project management estimates the time to complete each task and schedules the tasks for optimal efficiency.
• #10: In all but the smallest of firms there is a considerable organizational apparatus involved in projects which is one reason they can be so difficult to manage. In a textbook situation, the corporate planning group decides which general capabilities and functionalities are needed to achieve the firm’s overall strategy. Then an IT steering committee considers the matter and alternative ways to achieve what senior managers want and comes up with one or several projects. This committee assigns a project leader, who in turn selects a project team. The team develops the project and reports back up the line as progress is made.
• #11: This graphic illustrates what management levels the four main groups are at. Have the students describe the types of decision making (structured, unstructured, etc.) that each of the four groups would be involved in.
• #12: This slide emphasizes the importance of making sure systems projects will support the firm’s overall business goals. A key document in ensuring this is the information systems plan. What management decisions are involved in the management strategy? (Hardware acquisition; telecommunications; centralization of authority, data, and hardware; required organizational change)
• #13: This slide continues the look at the steps a firm should take in selecting the right systems projects to pursue. Ask students why it is important to inventory existing hardware and software. Ask students to give an example of a long-term information requirement versus a short-term information requirement. The slide also introduces KPIs as a way to evaluate information requirements of a firm. The book also describes other methodologies such as the balanced scorecard method which can also be useful for understanding what projects should be developed.
• #14: This slide discusses portfolio analysis, a method used to evaluate alternative systems projects according to their levels of risk and benefit. In portfolio analysis, you seek to have a balance between types of systems, based on the level of risk you can afford, similar to a financial portfolio. Ask students what kinds of systems projects would be riskier than others. How could you determine the relative benefit of an information system?
• #15: This graphic illustrates the priorities a firm should give to information systems with different levels of risk and benefit. The only projects to avoid are high-risk, low-benefit projects. The emphasis given to any of the other three categories depends upon the individual firm. What types of influences on or within a firm might alter the firm’s emphasis on one category (e.g., high-benefit, high-risk) over another?
• #16: This slide discusses another method used for selecting systems projects, scoring models. This method is useful when there are many criteria involved in the evaluation and decision. The table shows a short excerpt of an example scoring model for an ERP project that compares systems from two different vendors, A and B. Ask students which of the criteria are the most important to the firm (online order entry, inventory check). Columns 3 and 5 show the percentage to which each alternative ERP system fulfills the criteria. Each system’s score is calculated by multiplying the percentage of requirements met for each function by the weight attached to that function. ERP System B has the highest total score. It is important to note that qualitative judgments affect the scoring model, so a good practice is to cycle through the scoring model several times, changing the criteria and weights, to see how sensitive the outcome is to reasonable changes in criteria
• #17: In portfolio analysis, systems are compared along the lines of risk and benefit. This slide examines the ways a project’s benefits can be identified and quantified or evaluated. In addition to direct costs (costs for hardware, services, personnel, etc.) there are tangible benefits and intangible benefits. Ask students to provide examples of tangible and intangible benefits. Note that Chapter 5 introduced the total cost of ownership (TCO) method for evaluating the cost of information systems projects. The TCO method does include expenditures beyond the initial cost of purchasing and installing hardware and software, but does not typically deal with benefits, cost categories such as complexity costs, or “soft” and strategic factors discussed later.
• #18: This slide introduces the practice of using financial analysis to determine what the return on investment is for an information systems project. Ask students why using these capital budgeting methods may be more accurate in understanding the value of an information system rather than a TCO approach. At the same time, what are some of the pitfalls of using only an ROI approach to investing in IT? Although costs might be relatively easy to establish, benefits are not so easy to identify, and especially in a quantitative manner.
• #19: This slide discusses one financial method to evaluate IT projects, real options pricing models, which is based on the idea that initial expenditures can be seen as purchasing options for further IT project development. It is useful in situations in which the future revenue streams for a project are unclear. Ask students to describe what options valuation is. (“An option is essentially the right, but not the obligation, to act at some future date. A typical call option, for instance, is a financial option in which a person buys the right (but not the obligation) to purchase an underlying asset (usually a stock) at a fixed price (strike price) on or before a given date.”) What does this mean in terms of information systems projects? (“An initial expenditure on technology creates the right, but not the obligation, to obtain the benefits associated with further development and deployment of the technology as long as management has the freedom to cancel, defer, restart, or expand the project.”) A person’s educational decisions are a good example. Students go to college (make an investment) with the hope that when they obtain a degree they will be in a good position (a better position) to find a job that pays a respectable salary. This is options decision making: a college degree sets up the holder for a variety of new options on graduation. And maybe an immediate payoff. This method and other financial accounting methods do not take into account all of the factors that can affect costs and benefits. Ask the students to describe some of the factors that may affect revenues or costs (costs from organizational disruptions: cost to train end users, productivity costs due to users’ learning curves for a new system, time managers need to spend overseeing new system-related changes) as well as some of the benefits that may not be addressed by financial methods (more timely decisions from a new system, enhanced employee learning and expertise).
• #20: This slide discusses a second major factor in evaluating projects, risk. (Remember that portfolio analysis ranks systems according to two criteria, benefit and risk.) Most managers don’t like to think about risk and most make no attempt to measure it. Most managers are optimists and think about benefits. As we all know from the recent financial meltdown, financial managers did not seriously consider risk, and they might be fired if they did. A great many systems projects fail which could have been avoided had managers a better understanding of project risk. What is meant by risk? Ask students how the size of a project affects its risk. What does organizational complexity mean in this context? Which of these components are organizational versus technical? Can all of them be countered through better project management?
• #21: This slide emphasizes that introduction or alteration of an information system has a powerful behavioral and organizational impact. Change management is required to counter resistance and opposition. Ask students for examples of behavioral and organizational impacts that a new information system might have. What types of changes should an analyst look for in assessing the impact of a new system?
• #22: This slide introduces the concept of implementation and the role of the systems analyst as a change agent, a key role in change management efforts. Ask students what types of activities a change agent would engage in to encourage the adoption of a new information system throughout the enterprise. Why don’t employees and managers simply adopt new systems without question?
• #23: Two important factors in successful implementation are user involvement and management support. This slide discusses the role of users and the effects of the user–designer communications gap. Ask students to provide examples of user concerns and designer concerns regarding an information system. What are the goals of these two groups?
• #24: This slide discusses a second major factor in successful implementation—management support. It is particularly important to note that if management gives high priority to a project then the project will more likely be treated the same way by users. In what ways can management show support for a project? Which of these are most likely to influence users and technical staff? Why would managers sometimes not show enthusiastic support for a project? (Sometimes, personal, political, and organizational culture differences reduce support for some projects.)
• #25: This slide emphasizes the high failure rate for large-scale enterprise and business process redesign projects and the importance of implementation and change management. To some extent, the failure rate has declined in recent years as the major vendor firms stabilized their offerings, making the technology less of a risk. In turn, large corporations have developed a deep experience base with large scale systems. Nevertheless, large-scale system implementations almost invariably run over budget, and are behind schedule. Ask students to recall what implementation means. Ask students why both employees and managers become concerned about changes to functions and career paths.
• #26: The next slides discuss various project management, requirements gathering, and planning methodologies that can be used to counter different types of implementation problems. First, technical complexity can be managed by using internal integration tools. Why are these called “internal integration” tools?
• #28: This slide and the next two show the top, middle, and bottom portions of a Gantt Chart. The orange lines show the beginning, duration, and end of each task. Organizing a project in this way can allow a manager to see what is or should be worked on at any given time
• #29: This slide shows the middle of the Figure 14-4 Gantt chart.
• #30: This slide shows the Resource Summary section at the bottom of the Figure 14-4 Gantt chart. Here you can see total numbers of human work days across the bottom of the chart.
• #31: This graphic is a simplified PERT chart, which shows the dependencies between project tasks. Ask students to define what “dependencies” means and to point out the dependencies in this chart. Why are dependencies important to consider when managing a project?
• #32: This slide discusses a third type of tool to meet implementation challenges—external integration tools—and discusses the forms that user resistance may take. Ask students if they have ever witnessed user resistance to an information system at their work places.
• #33: This slide discusses methods to counter user resistance. Ask students why simply declaring a system “mandatory” may not be the best approach to effect user participation.
• #34: This slide discusses the ways in which a new information system can impact an organization. Table 14-5 in the text lists the organizational factors in systems planning and implementation. Ask students to identify some of these. (Employee participation and involvement, job design, standards and performance monitoring, ergonomics, employee grievance resolution procedures, health and safety, government regulatory compliance)
• #35: This slide discusses the use of an organizational impact analysis to anticipate how an upcoming system will affect an organization. It also discusses the use of sociotechnical design, a method to address human and organizational practices into information systems projects.
• #36: This slide discusses commercial software that is available to assist in managing projects, the most popular of which is Microsoft Project. There are also numerous online project management tools available over the Internet, from time-tracking tools to groupware. Ask students if they have ever used any project management software.