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January 25, 1999

Project Management Gets Little Attention

Project-management tools work, but few IS departments are using them.

By Philip Gill

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Return to main story, "Bank's Dividend Is Resource Managment"

n these days of tight IT budgets, you might think that development shops would use every tool at their disposal to manage their available resources. But as it turns out, UMB Bank of Kansas City, Mo., is an exception to the rule. In more than two-thirds of the IT shops surveyed by Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute, basic project-management tools and techniques aren't being used.

According to Matt Light, a research analyst at Gartner Group Inc.'s application development service, the Carnegie Mellon survey found that 70% of the IS departments polled were at level one of the institute's Capability Maturity Model when it came to internal software development efforts.

The institute's five-level Capability Maturity Model for Software charts the maturity, consistency, and effectiveness of an IS organization's processes for developing, maintaining, or procuring software. In the first level, the software development process is ad hoc, occasionally even chaotic, with few defined parameters. Success often depends on individual heroics.

Processes for repeatable quality assurance and configuration management and subcontract management, which are becoming increasingly important to application development, aren't used in almost 70% of IT shops, says Gartner Group's Light. "IT doesn't even start to think about project management and the tracking of performance checks unless it's a six-month or yearlong process," he adds.

The ad hoc nature of project and resource management in most IS shops means lost time and money, says Light. "IS shops don't do cost estimating very well."

UMB isn't tracking dollars either, says Tom Cox, the bank's process-control manager. But then, money wasn't the main motivation for the bank's project-management efforts--getting application development projects completed on time was. "In February last year, we had a 78% closed-on-schedule rate. In August, we had a 91.5% closed-on-schedule rate," Cox says.

And that improvement in on-time closings has a lot of visibility at UMB.

return to main story, "Bank's Dividend Is Resource Management"