In many ways, businesses’ increasing reliance on IT is a positive development. The recently published IT Governance Global Status Report showed that 87% of the 695 respondents considered IT to be very important to the corporate strategy and vision, and 63% reported IT was always or regularly on their board's agenda.

But this is not without its repercussions. A higher profile puts an onus on the IT department to deliver its services in a businesslike fashion. And that means IT managers must craft projects with water-tight business cases and proven returns on investment (ROI); entrust them to employees with the necessary skills and project ownership; and manage them throughout their entire lifecycle to deliver on time and on budget.

Project management has traditionally been a weakness of the IT industry, and while the development of software can be automated to a large extent, the delivery of the fruits of that development still relies on a considerable amount of human ingenuity, discipline and adaptability.

There are comprehensive and integrated project portfolio management (PPM) tools on the market which can ease this process. But the reality is that most software projects are managed and monitored using traditional, manual tools like Excel spreadsheets and Gantt charts, or isolated project management tools that monitor resources, progress and time individually. On top of that is a more fundamental challenge: the constantly changing and dynamic nature of modern business is nigh impossible to hardcode into applications.

Successful software delivery relies on various separate factors: managing and prioritising requests; judging their potential ROI and business impact; measuring the progress of the project to be able to adapt it if needed; allocating resources; tracking costs; training employees and giving them clear roles; meas-uring a project’s success and learning from mistakes.

The most successful companies may be able to tick most of these boxes, but most organisations are rather more inconsistent in their approach. For example, while 36% of respondents in an Information Age survey on software delivery management said they selected projects for funding by assessing them against other projects in their organisation’s portfolio, only 5% judged their success against the same criterion after completion.

Consequently, businesses often fail to realise the full benefits of a project they often will have planned, invested in and attempted to monitor for months, if not years. A survey by consultancy KPMG in January 2006 found that nearly half of the 600 organisations worldwide they talked to had suffered from at least one significant project failure in the past year, with a massive 86% losing out on up to a quarter of the promised benefits of projects.

Both the number and the complexity of projects are on the increase, as more money becomes available: 79% told KPMG’s survey their budgets were rising. Yet it is still commonplace for IT projects to exceed budget.

The secret to the successful delivery of a project seems to lie in a few core principles: visibility across the whole organisation, whether in terms of assessing the resources needed or tracking the overall impact; a clear sense of ownership from stakeholders to incentivise them to succeed; and the ability of management to adapt to changing circumstances.

Further reading

• http://www.information-age.com/article/2006/april/research_analysis
• http://www.information-age.com/article/2004/december/the_3d_manager
• http://www.information-age.com/article/2006/january/it_project_shortcomings
• http://www.information-age.com/article/2005/september/survey_highlights_lack_of_project_control