Projects + Management = The Project-Management Blog

Stewart, Rodney A.: A Framework for the Life Cycle Management of Information Technology Projects - ProjectIT; in: International Journal of Project Management, Vol. 26 (2008), pp. 203-212.

Stewart outlines a framework of management tasks which are set to span the whole life cycle of a project. The life cycle consists of 3 phases - selection (called “SelectIT”), implementation (called “ImplementIT”), and close-out (called “EvaluateIT”).

The first phase’s main goal is to single out the projects worth doing. Therefore the project manager evaluates cost & benefits (=tangible monetary factors) and value & risks (=intangible monetary factors). In order to evaluate these the project manager needs to define a probability function of these factors for the project. Then these distribution functions are aggregated. Stewart suggests using also the Analytical Hierarchy Process Method (AHP) and the Vertex method [which I am not familiar with, neither is wikipedia or the general internet] in this step. Afterwards the rankings for each project are calculated and the projects are ranked accordingly.

The second phase is merely a controlling view on the IT project implementation. According to Stewart you should conduct SWOT-Analyses, come up with a IT diffusion strategy, design the operational strategy, some action plans on how to implement IT, and finally a monitoring plan.

The third stage (”EvaluateIT”) advocates the use of an IT Balanced Score Card with 5 different perspectives - (1) Operations, (2) Benefits, (3) User, (4) Strategic competitiveness, and (5) Technology/System. In order to establish the Balanced Score Card measures for each category need to be defined first, then weighted, then applied and measured. The next step is to develop a utility function and finally overall IT performance can be monitored and improvements can be tracked.

This entry was posted on Donnerstag, Juli 17th, 2008 at 13:13 and is filed under Life Cycle Managment, Project Selection, Balanced Score Card, IT Project, Risk Management, Critical Success Factors, Software Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.