Project Management in Information Technology

The picture beloqe is an example of risk assessment which I did for my group project.

Even tired of typing :) I am happy that now, finally i am writing my reflections on the course. Project Management in IT (PMIT as called by all students) was a helpful course for me. I think this is what everyone has typed about the course but I would like to give a simple reason for this. In my opinion this subject is something that you "can touch". What do I mean by "something that you can touch"? I mean that everything you learn here, has a benefit which is; you can use it in real life. This makes the subject different from some other subjects that you (or better saying "me") read just for the purpose of finishing the final exam. I started this blog from an empty page, and now I am proud that I can return to this simple and small blog (I always tell my friends "my blog is the most boring blog in the net" :D :D) and read for my pleasure, because I really filled up those blank pages. Special thanks should of course, go to our lecturer who did t

In this post, we are going to focus on the importance of project procurement management and the increasing use of outsourcing for information technology projects. The term procurement means acquiring goods and/or services from an outside source. There are different ideas about outsourcing. Some companies, such as Wal-Mart, prefer to do no outsourcing at all, while others do a lot of outsourcing. But why do companies outsource? There are different reasons among which we may rank: a) To reduce both fixed and recurrent costs, b) To allow the client organization to focus on its core business, c) To access skills and technologies, d) To provide flexibility, e) To increase accountability. The main key of outsourcing is the contract , which is a mutually binding agreement that obligates the seller to provide the specified products or services and obligates the buyer to pay for them. Project procurement management means acquiring goods and services for a project from outside the performing

Do project managers understand what risk is and the importance of good project risk management? Risk management is often overlooked in projects, but it can help improve project success by helping select good projects, determining project scope, and developing realistic estimates. There exists mainly two types of risks. Positive and negative risks. Negative risk involves understanding potential problems that might occur in the project and how they might impede project success. Negative risk management is like a form of insurance; it is an investment. Beside this, positive risks are risks that result in good things happening; sometimes called opportunities. Project Risk Management Processes : 1 - Risk Management Planning: deciding how to approach and plan the risk management activities for the project. The main output of risk management planning is a risk management plan —a plan that documents the procedures for managing risk throughout a project.The project team should review project

We talked about human resource management on the last part. Of course that if we want to have a good relationship among employees and managers, the most important thing is to have good communication. And so, we come to the other knowledge area that is; Project Communications Management. Strong verbal skills are a key factor in career advancement for IT professionals. Project communication management includes the following processes; Communications Planning: Communications planning means determining the information and communications needs of the stakeholders. Every project should include some type of communications management plan. Communication management plan is a document that guides project communications. A very important document in this process is a stakeholder analysis. it describes the characteristics of the stakeholders which helps project managers on how to deal with them. An example for a stakeholder analysis for project communications is shown in the picture for further

Relationship with the employees has always been an important aspect of the modern civilizations. In different from the last century where the most important goal in an organization was to make the most possible profit, nowadays everyone has understood the importance of good relationship among people and the goal beside the profit, is having satisfied employees and customers. Many corporate executives have said, “People are our most important asset”. People are the factor which determine the success and failure of organizations and projects. As a new field IT is seeing an increase on the demand of its workforce. People with IT skills nowadays are needed almost in every area. The Digital Planet 2006 study estimated that the global marketplace for information and communications technology (ICT) would top $3 trillion in 2006 and reach almost $4 trillion by 2009. I think we are going far from our goal of this paper, so let's turn on what is project human resource management? We will und

In continuing with the nine knowledge areas, the turn comes for project quality management. It is very important to understand the importance of project quality management for information technology products and services because this will help in giving a better output which means, satisfied customers and stakeholders/sponsors. It is very important to give outputs qualified for IT development teams because it sometimes may lead to fatal errors, like the case were in 1986, two hospital patients died after receiving fatal doses of radiation from a Therac 25 machine after a software problem caused the machine to ignore calibration data. Quality in a project may be defined as "the project’s processes and products meet written specifications or more simple saying: "a product can be used as it was intended" . For a more technical definition, we may refer to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) which defines quality as “the degree to which a set of inherent

We have gone so far with project management in IT and we have seen that all of the three previous knowledge areas were very important for the development of a plan. Now the turn is for the "Project Cost Management". This is interesting because many information technology projects have a poor track record in meeting their budget goals. This because the project managers in IT often overlook the financial issues in project management because they think that this issue belongs only to the finance divisions or to the economics area of studying. Ok, I know that you may wandering now; what is exactly project cost management? In a few and simple words, we may conclude that project cost management includes the processes required to ensure that a project team completes a project within an approved budget. Because this knowledge area is important as the other areas are, it is project managers responsibility to be familiar with some of the basic concepts and principles of cost manageme

Project time management involves the processes required to ensure timely completion of a project. There are six main activities involved in this stage. (refer to the table in part 03.) 01. Activity Definition: after project charter, scope statement and WBS have been performed, project managers and project team using the information accumulated, begin developing a detailed list of activities and their attributes. The activity list is a tabulation of activities to be included in a project schedule. The scope of the activity definition is to ensure that the project team has complete understanding about the work that must be done, so they can start scheduling the work. 2. Activity sequencing: involves reviewing the activity list and attributes, project scope statement, milestone list, and approved change requests to determine the relationship between activities. The sequencing of activities and the processes depends from their dependencies. Depending on the activities, the nature of dep

Project scope management includes the processes involved in defining and controlling what is or is not included in a project. The are five main processes involved in project scope management. (referring to the table on chapter 04.) 1. Scope planning - the main output of the scope planning is the scope management plan which is a document that includes the necessary information for the team will create the project scope statement, how to create a WBS (work breakdown structure), control the deliverables and than control the closing process. As a key output of scope management plan includes a project charter which describes the high level goals for the project. It contains a title, project start and finished date as estimated, project managers information and contact, project objectives and so on until the comments about the project. 2. Project definition - the main output of project definition is creating a project scope statement . It comes after the preliminary scope statement and pro

Project Integration Management is the first knowledge area that we will focus on. Itinvolves coordinating all the other project management knowledge areas throughout a project's life cycle. There are seven main processes involved in project integration management: 1. Develop the project charter, 2. Develop the preliminary project scope statement, 3. Develop the project management plan, 4. Direct and manage project execution, 5. Monitor and control the project work, 6. Perform integrated change control, 7. Close the project. Now I will focus only on project integration management and its seven process groups. Through the other lessons, I will go in details about each of the other knowledge areas. main processes. The table in the end of this lesson will be used as a reference also in other lessons. Under initiating phase we have: a) Project Charter - it is a document that formally recognizes the existence of a project and provides direction on the project's objectives and manag

Project Management Process Groups can be viewed as a number of interrelated processes, starting from initiation activities until closing the activities. It includes five processes which are: 1 - Initiating processes: include defining and authorizing a project or a project phase. The main goal is to formally select and start off the project. 2 - Planning processes: which includes devising an maintaining a workable scheme. Different firms use different tools to implement the planning process. It has as output a giantt charts, WBSs (work breakdown structure), etc. 3 - Executing processes: concerned about coordinating people and resources to carry out the carious plans and produce the products or services of the project or the project phase. Usually takes the most time and resources. One of the most important skills in this level is the leadership skills. 4 - Monitoring and controlling processes: include frequently measuring and monitoring to ensure the project team follows the schedule

Project Management can be thought as an approach to describe management and problem solving. It includes three parts: 1. System philosophy - a model of thinking about things as systems, 2. System analysis - a problem solving approach, and 3. System management - addressing issues before making changes to systems. To select if to undertake a project or not, project managers must take into consideration the three sphere model which includes analyzing: business, organization and technology (as shown in the picture). Business is concerned with questions like; what will the project cost to the company? What impact it will have? What is going to be the support cost and so on. The organization sphere concerns about: Who will be affected by the project? Who will train the staff and so on. And lastly, the technology sphere is concerned about the issues like: What devices will be used? What operating system? How the system will be accessed and other questions similar to these. 2.1 UNDERSTANDING T

As with every other subject, the first thing that comes to mind is the question: What is this subject about? Therefore, the subject opens with the introduction to what is Project Management in Information Technology. PMIT is "the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to project activities to meet project requirements". In purely words it may be understood as the "discipline of planning, organizing and managing resources available to complete a project". And as you may already know, the project here is meant the temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product or service as a result ". The project itself to be successful, should accomplish some attributes such as: its unique purpose, resources, sponsor etc. Every project has three main goals that must be balanced when developing a project. The three goals are: 1. Scope, 2. Time and 3. Cost. Every project must meet this three goals. furthermore, it is very important that when we want to