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Managing and Using Information Systems: A Strategic Approach – Sixth Edition

Keri Pearlson, Carol Saunders, and Dennis Galletta

Chapter 11 Project Management

Rural Payments Agency Case

What were the recurring problems with the RPA’s Single Payment Scheme project between 2006 and 2014?

What system was rolled out in 2015 to solve the problems? How did it solve the problems?

What problems occurred in 2015? What was the solution?

What were the causes of the problems?

Inequities, inaccurate property data, and delays in payments. Led many farmers to go bankrupt.

Basic Payment Scheme. It fixed inequities and allowed richer data to be collected (vegetation and terrain).

Identity verification wasn’t working well, the system was at capacity and slow. The solution was to allow farmers to submit paper, essentially going backwards 10 years.

Implementation began before the specs were agreed-on. Testing was inadequate. Warnings were ignored.

Failed IS Projects

Standish Group found that:

67% of all software projects are “challenged!”

Late, or

Over budget, or

Don’t perform

Even one failure could endanger a firm!

Definition of “Project”

“[A] project is a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service.”

Temporary—every project has a definite beginning and a definite end.

Unique—the product or service is different in some distinguishing way from all similar products or services.”

-Project Management Institute (1996)

Project vs Operations

Characteristics	Operations	Projects
Purpose	Sustain the firm	Reach a goal
When to change	When operations no longer serve the goals	When a goal is reached
Quality control	Formal	Informal
Tasks	Repetitive	Unique
Duration	Ongoing	Temporary

Project Stakeholders

Anyone (or any firm)

Involved

With affected interests

Obvious players:

Project manager, project team

Project sponsor (general manager funding it)

Customers (huge variety)

Employees

Programs vs Projects

A program is a set of related projects that accomplish a strategic objective

Examples: TQM; workplace safety

Project Management

“Application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities in order to meet project requirements.”

Trade-offs must be made

Pick any two!

Time

Cost

Scope

Project Triangle

Picking any two

Fast and cheap: It won’t be good!

Slapped together or using interns

Fast and good: It won’t be cheap!

Purchase solution/hire “rock star” skilled team

Cheap and good: It won’t be fast!

This option is possible if you would wait for open source solution or use

Project Management Software

Top five PM systems

Microsoft Project

Atlassian Jira

Podio

Smartsheet

Basecamp

Project Management Office

Project support

Project management process and methods

Training

Project management home base

Internal consulting and mentoring

Project management software tools and support

Portfolio management (managing multiple projects)

Essential Elements

Project management

Project team

Project cycle plan

Common project vocabulary

Element 1: Project Management

Identifying requirements

Defining the team’s structure

Assigning team members

Managing risks / leveraging opportunities

Measuring the project’s status

Making the project visible to others

Comparing project status against plan

Taking corrective action when necessary

Providing project leadership

Require planning

Require

taking

action

Project Leadership

Strong project leaders focus, align, and motivate members by managing

Team composition

Reward systems

Strong processes trade off against strong leadership (next slide)

Project

Leadership

Project

Management Process

More leadership

Needed

Less leadership

Needed

No PM process

Team is new to PM process

Team does not value process

PM process exists

Team is fully trained in process

Team values process

Project leadership vs. project management process

Element 2: Project Team

Helpful: collect a set of people with the needed

Skills

Knowledge

Experiences

Capabilities

They must also represent their departments

Element 3: Project Cycle Plan

Organizes the steps and defines dates

Breaks work into phases

End is “go live” date

“Control gates:” ready to move to next phase?

Tools include PERT/GANTT

PERT

Gantt

Template – Other Views

Unfreezing

Change

Refreezing

Element 4: Common Project Vocabulary

Make sure everyone knows what the following mean:

“End of year”

“Divestment” vs “sale”

“Acquisition” vs “purchase”

“Customer” vs “user”

Difficulties

IT projects are difficult to estimate and most fail to meet their schedules and budgets

Highly interactive, complex sets of tasks

Closely interrelated with each other (coupled)

Most projects cannot be made more efficient simply by adding labor

Some are actually slowed down (Brooks’ Law)

Systems Development Life Cycle

SDLC typically consists of typical phases such as:

Initiation of the project

The requirements definition phase

The functional design phase

The system is actually built

Verification phase

The “cut over:” The new system is put in operation

The maintenance and review phase

Different models have different numbers of phases

Limitations of SDLC

Traditional SDLC methodology for current IT projects are not always appropriate:

Sometimes costs are difficult to estimate

Sometimes uniqueness makes previous experience hard or impossible to find

Objectives may reflect a scope that is

Too broad (can’t solve it), or

Too narrow (not ambitious enough)

Might take too long when the business environment is very dynamic

Alternative Approaches – for speed

Iterative approaches enable evolutionary development

Other Approaches

Prototyping

Build a high-level version of the system very quickly and get feedback

Advantages:

User involvement early and throughout the development process

Disadvantages:

Documentation may be difficult to write

Users may not have a realistic scope of the system while making decisions

RAD (Rapid Application Development) prototyping + 4-step SDLC

Like prototyping, RAD uses iterative development tools to speed up development:

GUI, reusable code, code generation, databases, testing, debugging

Goal is much faster building of the system

Other Approaches (continued)

JAD (Joint Application Development) – IBM

Users are involved throughout the process

“Agile” approaches speed things up

XP (Extreme Programming), Scrum, etc.

Other Approaches (continued)

User-centered design

Focuses on usability but uses many of the tools of RAD, JAD, Agile, prototyping

Users participate and continuously evaluate usability

Usability.gov provides 209 guidelines

Technology is advancing so they are dated (e.g., touchscreen tablets are not included)

“How or why” for touch PC O/S not yet settled

Requires multidisciplinary approach: psychology, graphic art, Internet technologies, business needs, etc.

Other Approaches (continued)

Open source approach

Uses crowdsourcing

Code is available for all to see and improve

Linux: the basis for

Android

Some Garmin GPS

Some Sony TVs

OS/X is based on BSD

BSD and Linux come from Unix

Comparison of approaches

Methodology	Advantages	Disadvantages
SDLC	Structured approach Phase milestones and approvals Uses system approach Focuses on goals and trade-offs Emphasizes documentation Requires user sign-offs	Systems often fail to meet objectives Needed skills are often difficult to obtain Scope may be defined too broadly or too narrowly Very time consuming
Agile Development	Good for adapting to changing requirements Works well when user requirements change continuously Allows face-to-face communication and continuous inputs from users Speeds up development process Users like it	Hard to estimate system deliverables at start of project Under-emphasizes designing and documentation Easy to get project off-track if user goals are unclear
Prototyping	Improved user communications Users like it Speeds up development process Good for eliciting system requirements Provides a tangible model to serve as basis for production version	Often under-documented Not designed to be an operational version Often creates unrealistic expectations Difficult-to-manage development process Integration often difficult Design flaws more prevalent than in SDLC Often hard to maintain

What Makes a Project Risky?

Risk Framework

Complexity

Many parts? Impacts on rest of system? Global? Unfamiliar hardware/software/databases? Changing requirements?

Clarity

Hard to define the purpose, input, and output?

Size

Cost, staff, duration, team, departments affected, lines of code

They are geometric, not linear (additive):

Having all three of these would be much more than three times as bad as one of these.

Managing Risk from Complexity

Strategies to deal with complexity:

Leverage the Technical Skills of the Team such as having a leader or team members who have had significant experience

Rely on Consultants and Vendors – for additional expertise

Integrate Within the Organization such as

Having frequent team meetings

Extensive documentation

Regular technical status reviews

Managing Risk from Clarity

Strategies to deal with low clarity

Rely more heavily upon the users to define system requirements

Manage stakeholders by balancing the disparate goals

Sustain Project Commitment

Project Commitment – Important for project success

Determinant	Description	Examples	More likely for commitment if:
Project	Objective attributes of the project	Cost, benefits, expected difficulty, and duration	There is a large potential payoff.
Psychological	Factors managers use to convince themselves things are not so bad	Previous experience, personal responsibility for outcome, and biases.	There is a previous history of success.
Social	Elements of the various groups involved in the process	Rivalry, norms for consistency, and need for external validation	External stakeholders have been publicly led to believe the project will be successful.
Organizational	Structural attributes of the organization	Political support, and alignment with values and goals	There is strong political support from executive levels.
Cultural	Cultural attributes	Appreciation for teamwork or a focus on technical issues	There is a culture of teamwork.

Pulling the Plug

Often projects in trouble persist long after they should have been abandoned—Pull the plug!

Many projects are 99% complete for 50% of the project!

People can go to great lengths to sustain a doomed project when there are

Sunk costs

High penalties for failure

Emotional attachment to the project by powerful individuals

Four dimensions of success

Shenhar, Dvir and Levy’s (1998) four dimensions of success:

Resource constraints: does the project meet the time and budget criteria?

Impact on customers: how much benefit does the customer receive from the project?

Business success: how high and long are the profits produced by the project?

Prepare for the future: has the project enabled future success? Future impact?

Figure 11.11 Success dimensions for various project types.

Managing and Using Information Systems: A Strategic Approach – Sixth Edition

Keri Pearlson, Carol Saunders, and Dennis Galletta