Chapter 2:

The Project Management and Information

Technology Context

Information Technology
Project Management,
Fifth Edition
 Projects Cannot Be Run in Isolation
• Projects must operate in a broad
organizational environment
• Project managers need to use systems
thinking
– Taking a holistic view of carrying out projects
within the context of the organization
• Senior managers must make sure projects
continue to support current business needs
 A Systems View of Project Management
• A systems approach emerged in the 1950s to
describe a more analytical approach to
management and problem solving
– Management must see how projects relate to the whole
orgnaization
• Three parts include:
– Systems philosophy: an overall model for thinking
about things as systems
– Systems analysis: problem-solving approach
– Systems management: address business, technological,
and organizational issues before making changes to
systems
 Opening Case Analysis
• Tom Walters did not use a systems approach –
the IT department did all of the planning
– He did not address many of the organizational
issues involved in such a complex project
– He did not clearly define the business, technological
and organizational issues associated with the
project
– He did not involve the stakeholders which led to his
being blindsided by the problems raised at the
meeting
 Three Sphere Model for 5

Systems Management of Laptop Project

Information Technology Project Management, Fifth Edition, Copyright 2007

 Understanding Organizations
Structural frame: Human resources frame:
Focuses on roles and Focuses on providing
responsibilities, agreement between needs
coordination and control. of the organization and
Organization charts help needs of people.
define this frame.

Political frame: Symbolic frame: Focuses

Assumes organizations on symbols and meanings
are coalitions composed related to events. Was it
of varied individuals and good the CEO came to the
interest groups. Conflict kickoff meeting? Culture is
and power are key issues. important, particularly in
international projects.
 7

What Went Wrong?

 Many enterprise resource planning (ERP) projects fail due to organizational
issues, not technical issues. For example, Sobey’s Canadian grocery store chain
uncontrolled its two-year, $90 million ERP system due to organizational
problems.
 As Dalhousie University Associate Professor Sunny Marche states, “The
problem of building an integrated system that can accommodate different
people is a very serious challenge. You can’t divorce technology from the
sociocultural issues. They have an equal role.”
 People in different parts of the company had different terms for various items.
 People had their daily work to do and did not want to take the required time to get
the new system to work
 Sobey’s ERP system shut down for five days and employees were
scrambling to stock potentially empty shelves in several stores for weeks. The
system failure cost Sobey’s more than $90 million and caused shareholders
to take an 82-cent after-tax hit per share.*

Information Technology Project Management, Fifth Edition, Copyright 2007

 Organizational Structures
• Related to political and structural frames
• Three basic organization structures
– Functional: functional managers report to the CEO
– Project: program managers report to the CEO
– Matrix: middle ground between functional and
project structures; personnel often report to two or
more bosses;
Functional, Project, and Matrix
9

Organizational Structures
 Organizational Culture
• Just as an organization’s structure affects its ability to manage,
so does an organization’s culture.
• Organizational culture is a set of shared assumptions, values,
and behaviors that characterize the functioning of an
organization
• Many experts believe the underlying causes of many
companies’ problems are not the structure or staff, but the
culture
– Even within one organization, one department’s culture may be
different from another department’s culture (technology vs.
finance)
• Some cultures make it easier to manage projects
 11

Ten Characteristics of
Organizational Culture
1. Member identity: The degree to which employees
identify with the organization as a whole rather than
with their type of job or profession.
.
2. Group emphasis: The degree to which work activities
are organized around groups or teams, rather than
individuals.
–An organizational culture that emphasizes group
work is best for managing projects.

Information Technology Project Management, Fifth Edition, Copyright 2007

 12

Ten Characteristics of
Organizational Culture
3. People focus: The degree to which management’s decisions take into account
the effect of outcomes on people within the organization.
– A PM might assign tasks to certain people without considering their individual
needs, or the PM might know each person very well and focus on individual
needs when assigning work or making other decisions.
– Good PMs often balance the needs of individuals and the organization.
4. Unit integration: The degree to which units or departments within an
organization are encouraged to coordinate with each other.
– Most PMs strive for strong unit integration to deliver a successful product,
service, or result.
– An organizational culture with strong unit integration makes the project
manager’s job easier.
5. Control: The degree to which rules, policies, and direct supervision are used
to oversee and control employee behavior.
– Experienced PMs know it is often best to balance the degree of control to get
good project results.

Information Technology Project Management, Fifth Edition, Copyright 2007

 13

Ten Characteristics of
Organizational Culture
6. Risk tolerance: The degree to which employees are encouraged to be
aggressive, innovative, and risk seeking.
– An organizational culture with a higher risk tolerance is often best for
project management since projects often involve new technologies, ideas, and
processes.
7. Reward criteria: The degree to which rewards, such as promotions and
salary increases, are allocated according to employee performance rather
than seniority, favoritism, or other non-performance factors.
– Project managers and their teams often perform best when rewards are based
mostly on performance.
8. Conflict Tolerance: The degree to which employees are encouraged to air
conflicts and criticism openly.
– It is very important for all project stakeholders to have good communications, so
it is best to work in an organization where people feel comfortable discussing
conflict openly.

Information Technology Project Management, Fifth Edition, Copyright 2007

 14

Ten Characteristics of
Organizational Culture
9. Means-ends orientation: The degree to which management focuses
on outcomes rather than on techniques and processes used to
achieve results.
– An organization with a balanced approach in this area is often best for
project work.
10. Open-systems focus: The degree to which the organization monitors
and responds to changes in the external environment.
– Projects are part of a larger organizational environment, so it is best to
have a strong open-systems focus.

Information Technology Project Management, Fifth Edition, Copyright 2007

 Stakeholder Management
• Project managers must take time to identify,
understand, and manage relationships with all
project stakeholders
• Using the four frames of organizations can help
meet stakeholder needs and expectations
– Since organizations have limited resources, projects
affect top management, other functional managers and
other project managers by using some of those resources
• Senior executives/top management are very
important stakeholders
 Need for Organizational Commitment
to Information Technology (IT)
• If the organization has a negative attitude toward IT, it
will be difficult for an IT project to succeed
• Having a Chief Information Officer (CIO) at a high level
in the organization helps IT projects
• Assigning non-IT people to IT projects also encourages
more commitment
• Some CEOs take a strong leadership role in promoting
the use of information technology in their organizations
Need for Organizational Standards

• Standards and guidelines help project managers be

more effective
• Senior management can encourage:
– The use of standard forms and software for project
management
– The development and use of guidelines for writing project
plans or providing status information
– The creation of a project management office or center of
excellence to help PMs achieve project goals
– Development of career paths for PMs and/or requiring PMP
certification
Project Phases and the Project Life
Cycle
• A project life cycle is a collection of project
phases that defines:
– What work will be performed in each phase
– What deliverables will be produced and when
– Who is involved in each phase
– How management will control and approve work
produced in each phase
• A deliverable is a product or service produced
or provided as part of a project
 Phases of the Traditional
Project Life Cycle

19
 Predictive Life Cycle Models
• Project team spends a large portion of the project attempting to
clarify the requirements of the entire system and then producing a
design
• Users are often unable to see tangible results in terms of working
software for an extended period
• Waterfall model: has well-defined, linear stages of systems
development and support
• Spiral model: shows that software is developed using an iterative or
spiral approach rather than a linear approach
• Incremental build model: provides for progressive development of
operational software
• Prototyping model: used for developing prototypes to clarify user
requirements
• Rapid Application Development (RAD) model: used to produce
systems quickly without sacrificing quality
 Product Life Cycles
– Adaptive Software Development (ASD) life cycle:
requirements cannot be clearly expressed, projects
are mission driven and component based, using
time-based cycles to meet target dates
• Development proceeds by creating components that provide
the functionality specified by the business group as these
needs are discovered in a more free-form approach
• Requirements are developed using an iterative approach and
development is risk driven and change tolerant to address
and incorporate rather than mitigate risks
 Product Life Cycles
• Large IT projects are usually composed of several
smaller, more manageable projects, especially
when there is a lot of uncertainty involved
– Some aspect of project management need to occur
during each phase of the product life cycle
• Systems planning phase for a new information system can
include a project to hire an outside consulting firm to help
identify and evaluate potential strategies for developing a
particular business application
• Implementation phase might include a project to hire outside
programmers code part of the system
• Close-out phase might include a project to develop and run
several training sessions for users of the new application
 The Importance of Project Phases
and Management Reviews
• A project should successfully pass through each of the project
phases in order to continue on to the next
• Management reviews, also called phase exits or kill points,
should occur after each phase to evaluate the project’s progress,
likely success, and continued compatibility with organizational
goals
– At the end of the concept phase, the project team could have presented
information to the faculty, president and other staff members that
described different options for increasing the use of technology, an
analysis of what competing colleges were doing and results of a survey of
local stakeholders’ opinions on the subject. Unfavorable results could
have resulted in stopping the project at that point and not investing more
time, effort and money.
 The Context of IT Projects
• IT projects can be very diverse in terms of size,
complexity, products produced, application
area, and resource requirements
• IT project team members often have diverse
backgrounds and skill sets
• IT projects use diverse technologies that
change rapidly; even within one technology
area, people must be highly specialized
 Questions
• 1. How could you mitigate if your manager
challenge your decision?
• 2. What kind of activities will you performed
through to keep your employee motivated?
• 3. What is different between Manager and
Leader?

•Information Technology Project

Management, Sixth Edition