Integrated Business & IT Project Management.

In most cases IT is not the end goal but a means to support the business strategy and business goals. Projects should be managed explicitly from this insight and therefore could better realize the potential of IT for the Business. The approach of good Business & IT Project Management" is therefore based on the following goals:

• exhaustive and clear setup of the project governance on the Business side
  
• flexible and transparent setup of the IT projects
• continuous but efficient feedback between the Business & IT.

Additionally it is advised to identify and realize 20% of the effort that realizes 80% of the benefits. This approach contributes to the control and predictability of the projects without diminishing quality and added value.

Integrated Business & IT Project Management.

Increased competition drives management simultaneously to more innovation and cost reduction in operations. Offering innovative, added value services to their customers becomes a must. Such services are mostly realized by better integration of business processes. IT must keep up the pace with this development (or ideally be ahead of it).

Example: more and more back office business logic and company data is being pulled into the front office systems to allow 'cleaner' sales order entry and better customer service in the Points of Sale. The data or information in all corporate databases must become ubiquitous, in other words if the Business wants to serve the customer better it must 'self-evidently' be able to get hold of all information anywhere, anytime and anyplace.

SOX compliance regulation is another force that puts complementary demands to the integration of Business processes and IT systems.

Result: there are more links between the IT systems, the business processes and IT systems are more tightly coupled, business processes are becoming more integrated in the Supply Chain, the governance and stakeholder structure is becoming more complex.

Phenomenon. Almost every (innovation) project initiated by the Business becomes a chain-project with involvement of Business and IT stakeholders across the entire Supply Chain. From experience I learned that these chain-projects are considerable more challenging to manage and control.

Conclusion. The higher occurrence of chain-projects and growing dependency between Business and IT can be viewed as two challenges that face Project Management. The profession Project Management must adjust and evolve to transform these challenges into success. I practice project management that puts cooperation between Business and IT central and where the multitude of stakeholders gets managed effectively.

Image: name of the photogenic dog is Pepper, picture taken in Varsenare Belgium.