IT Planning Managing Risks of Large-Scale

IT Planning

Managing Risks of Large-Scale IT Projects

Designing and implementing an effective online national learning system that can scale to securely support 30,000 employees across Colorado, Illinois, Florida and Texas in addition to supporting advanced professional development applications, calendaring, data uploads and downloads and social media is fraught with risks. There are many potential risks to this system both at the user adoption and technology-related levels. The intent of this analysis is to list the most significant risks, followed by the defining of the top two. These two most significant risks will have a plan developed to mitigate their potential impact on the project. Empirical studies indicate that knowledge-based IT projects have the greatest risk in that they include the most amount of change management (Alhawari, Karadsheh, Talet, Mansour, 2012). With a system such as the one designed there is also the paradox of significant value being delivered while also requiring employees to change their activity and learning styles significantly; two areas of resistance to change in enterprise projects (Besner, Hobbs, 2012). There is also the challenge of ensuring it stays focused on the governance-related rules and structure of the company (Ali, Green, 2012).

Analysis of IT Project Risk for the National Online Learning System

There are a multitude of risks with a project this large, from the potential that it will be only adopted by a small percentage of users to the potential for lack of integration to make it useless. In between these many risks are the most significant, which are discussed here. First, there is the risk of no one using it due to lack of change management programs being put into place (Ramsay, Boardman, Cole, 1996). This single factor is the most citied for the failure of enterprise systems including Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems is the lack of focus on change management and providing users with an opportunity to fully customize the systems to their needs (de Bakker, Boonstra, Wortmann, 2012).

A second major risk is the lack of system planning and integration execution

(Piperca, Floricel, 2012). The lack of planning and execution specifically for making learning processes integrated into legacy and planning IT systems is very significant and could lead to the system running extremely slow, making it inoperable. A third risk is the lack of governance and policies for the use of social media in conjunction with the site which could lead to valuable content being distributed through Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites (Ali, Green, 2012). This would drastically reduce the value of the learning system as well.