Project Management: Information Technology

Project Management

Importance of Aligning IT projects with corporate strategy

IT is an integral part of business operations, helping organizations to, among things, enhance their productivity, standardize processes, reduce operational costs, and implement business strategies. It is crucial, therefore that IT projects align with the organization's corporate strategy, and that the two are synchronized towards the accomplishment of organizational goals. Lack of synchronization between projects and business strategy has been identified as one of the leading causes of project failure (Beveridge, n.d.). IT projects often require huge chunks of initial capital and as long as they are not in line with the overall corporate strategy, chances are that they will be cancelled prior to completion because of delivering less than the intended features, being over the budget, or developing products that never get used.

Companies, even the most established of them, are finding it increasingly difficult to align their IT projects with their corporate strategies. The National Computing Center, UK attributes this to the fact that IT strategies are mostly designed to focus on technology products, rather than on business products - resulting in rigid and ineffective infrastructures. The center identifies a need for businesses to adopt a new approach that focuses on retro-fitting IT structures into business functionality, and not vice versa. It proposes a seven-step alignment plan, which includes (Beveridge, n.d.):

i) Understanding the business by undertaking a review seeking to identify and document all projects that are currently ongoing, and those completed in the previous financial period

ii) Understanding the organization's culture by analyzing its nature, ethos, and structure

iii) Analyzing all IT delivery channels, applications, and assets

iv) Analyzing the relationship between the IT estate and the overall business

v) Understanding the implications, contribution, and impacts of the IT estate on the company

vi) Identifying high priority-projects and developing an implementation timeline for the same

vii) Translating the timeline into business unit plans, and determining the cost requirements for the drawn-up plans

How to Keep your Project's Stakeholders Engaged and Informed

Adequate communication is the only way to keep one's stakeholders informed and consequently, engaged -- you cannot be engaged in a project if you are not informed, and hence, do not understand its processes, progress, and implications. In this regard, project "communications are a critical deliverable of every successful project" (Nielsen, 2014, n.pag). Very often, projects are perceived as failures despite having delivered on their promises; and this is mostly because the projects manager did not adequately communicate its success to stakeholders (Nielsen, 2014). Notwithstanding the undisputable importance of project communications, it would be inappropriate to just provide an umbrella form of communication for all stakeholders, particularly because individual stakeholder groups have different requirement sets for project information, and what is preferred by one may, therefore, not necessarily be preferred by another. Towards this end, there is need to identify the different stakeholder categories and define both the communication method and the type of project information that best suits each individual category.