02. The Project Management and Information Technology Context

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 THE ORGANIZATIONS
Organizations can be viewed as having four frames:
I) Political Frame - different groups are within the organizations and the power is the key issue.
II) Structural Frame - focuses on roles and responsibilities among members.
III) Human Resources Frame - focuses on providing harmony among members
IV) Symbolic Frame - this is similar to the culture inside the organization.
There are three types of organizationl structure as described below:

1 - Functional Organization
In this case, the staff is grouped hierarchically by specialty. As seen in the picture below, this is how it would look if we do a OBS (Organizational Breakdown Structure) for this type of organization. Here, each employee has one supervisor.
2 - Projectized Organization
In a projectized organizational structure, the project manager has full authority to assign duties and direct the work of every team member assigned to the project. An Organizational Breakdown Structure of the "project structure" would be as the one shown in the picture. Here the employee report directly to the manager of the project being done, not to the functional manager. Except for very large projects, few organizations have projectized structures because they are more expensive to operate and less efficient than some other types of organizational structures.
3 - Matrix Structure
In the matrix organizational structure functional and project structures are blend together. The Organizational Breakdown Structure for the "matrix structure" is shown in the picture. In a matrix organizational structure, the project manager shares responsibility with the functional managers to assign priorities and direct the work of the people assigned to the project.
The structure of the organization depends on the type of the project being implemented. For any project to be implemented, it has to go through the project life cycle - a collection a project phases. The life cycle of any project is described by its System Development Life Cycle (SDLC). There are four steps to go through the life cycle of an organization. These include: concept, development, implementation and close-out. However once again, the life cycle model, depends on the project and the organization itself.

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