IT Project management is the procedure of organizing, planning, and outlining responsibility for the completion of a company’s IT (information technology) goals. It includes overseeing projects for hardware installations, software development, network upgrades, virtualization rollouts, and cloud computing, business analytics, and data management projects and putting into place IT services.
What Problems can Cause a Project to Fail?
As well as day to day problems that can cause a project to fail, there are other factors that can have a negative effect on an IT project’s success. This can include infrastructure changes that have an impact on data management and security, advances in technology whilst the project is being executed, and unknown dependent relationships between software, hardware, data, and network infrastructure. New technology is likely to suffer from some complications which could affect the project’s chances of success.
Managing Projects
There are five processes you should follow when starting a new project. The specific phases within your project, however, are unique to your business and project and represent the project life cycle. There is also a lot of brilliant project management software available that can help you get started. Here are the steps you will need to follow:
- Initiation – The need, goal or problem of the project is identified. A project charter is created and a project manager is assigned to the project.
- Planning – The manager and the project team make a plan of the steps that are needed to make their plan successful. The planning process continues throughout the project in most cases.
- Execution – Once a plan is in place, the team begins putting it into place. The project may go back to the planning stage many times during the execution stage.
- Monitoring and controlling – This is where the manager keeps an eye on the time it is taking, the quality, the scope, the cost, the risk, and other factors. This is an ongoing process that ensures the project meets its targets.
- Closing – After each phase and at the end of the project, project closure takes place. Project closure ensures that all of the work has been completed to an agreed standard and then usually transfers ownership to operations.
IT Project Life Cycle
There are a number of different ways to manage an IT project that can affect the project life cycle. The project life cycle of a normal IT project goes through repetitions of planning, executing and controlling until the project is closed. There are three common IT project management life cycles:
- Predictive life cycle
- Iterative life cycle
- Adaptive life cycle
Each of these life cycles use phases to move the project to the next stage. A phase describes the kind of work that will need to take place during that part of the project. There are many things that can influence a project manager into choosing a life cycle, including the organization’s requirements and the customers’ requirements.
Project management allows you to plan your projects, track and assign work to your employees, keep an eye on the resources you are using and collaborate with your team to ensure your project is running on time. Why not have a look and find out which life cycle suits your project?
