Project Management Keeps IT From Being A Victim Of Success

JUST VOTE NO
Once you put a process in place, the other P-word--politics--will inevitably appear. "With budget and resource constraints, someone is not going to get their project done," said an IT manager for a major medical manufacturer. The key question is, will the business unit left out in the cold wait its turn or stage a coup? The magic behind PPM is that, when you do it right, it becomes clear why a given project shouldn't get done in the context of your overall IT governance strategy. Indeed, some organizations fold project evaluation into their IT governance committees, instead of creating separate teams. Still others, because of the scarcity of executive time, use the team only as an appeal mechanism. In our discussions with CIOs and IT practitioners, one topic came up again and again: What happens if your portfolio management process comes up with a "not now" or a "no" for a business unit's project, but the business unit--which has its own budget and a degree of autonomy--moves ahead anyway, without IT's approval, and then this rogue project ends up creating urgent unplanned work for IT as the improperly planned technology spirals out of control or fails to integrate with enterprise systems?

ITPI's Milne answers this question with a question: "How do you handle it when your corporate strategy says, 'We're not going into the Latin America market,' and a line business does it anyway?" If your PPM process is sufficiently integrated into executive corporate strategy, units that are totally out of line will not need to be nailed by IT--the organization will rein them in, with or without IT's participation.

Jonathan Feldman is director of IT services for the city of Asheville, N.C., and an InformationWeek contributing editor. Write to him at [email protected].

Photograph by Getty Images

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