IMPORTANCE OF IS IN MANAGING BUSINESS PROJECTS

Information System Importance in Managing Business Projects



Information System Importance in Managing Business Projects

Introduction

Project Management finds its origins back as far as the building of the Egyptian Pyramids and the Great Wall of China. Many disciplines including construction, engineering, and operations management have found the use of Project Management as an integral part to their success. This same importance is resonating throughout the Information Technology (IT) community.

IT projects often go over budget, past deadlines and often enough, the projects are dropped at the loss of millions largely due to poor project management skills. Project Management consists of many knowledge areas. However, the identification of the areas of Project Management emphasized in the literature over history is underrepresented. The purpose of this paper is to identify, classify and track IT project management research as well as investigate whether there indeed is a researcher practitioner discrepancy, and if so, on which topics it is especially noticeable.

Project management information systems have changed considerably over the last decade. They no longer focus on scheduling and resource management alone. Instead, they have become comprehensive systems that support the entire lifecycle of projects, project programs, and project portfolios. In this context, projectoriented organizations are facing a new challenge: the design, implementation, and operation of project management information systems have become increasingly complex. Numerous processes have to be considered, diverse stakeholder interests taken into account, and corresponding software systems selected. The reference information model presented in this Study addresses this challenge and aims to accelerate the setup of project information systems.

Background

During the 1990s as the importance and dependency of Information Systems (IS) to the success of organisations increased, IS projects became commonplace. However, in many organisations, due to the high failure rate of IS projects and the associated costs, effective and successful IS project management became a crucial issue (Whittaker 1999, Mahaney and Lederer 1999).

Project management as a discipline is well defined and expanding rapidly throughout many fields (Hoffman 1997, Pinto 1997). There is a large body of research which investigates the skills that effective project managers need (Weston and Stedman 1998, Steen 1997, Posner 1995), why IS projects fail (Sauer et al. 1998), and how to overcome failure (Whittaker 1999, Mahaney and Lederer 1999), as well as project management methodologies that can be applied to ensure the success of projects (Frame 1995, Meredith and Mantel 1995, Rosenau 1998, Lloyds TSB 1998, Project Management Program 1997).

Despite this research and the range of methodologies available for IS projects, there has not been a noticeable performance improvement with IS projects within the IS field (Sauer et al. 1998). Because of the complexity and ever-changing nature of IS, IS projects can be considered distinct from other projects, requiring a different form of organisation and management (Sauer et al. 1998). IS project management as a discipline therefore requires further investigation and a correspondingly greater level of understanding than just the skills required and methodologies that can be ...