Choosing the right projects requires assembling a complete view of IT project demand and applying fair, consistent evaluation criteria. But historical bad habits and immature processes can undermine these foundational requirements.
CIOs must identify and confront problems such as informal project request and approval mechanisms, unclear evaluation criteria, and unofficial back-door approval paths. This won’t be easy: some customers and even IT staff may prefer familiar ad hoc project processes to more mature ones.
To get a better understanding of project prioritization options and possibilities, watch our webconference to learn about the results of the IT Forum's Project Management Functional Collaborative.
The 55 project management leaders who participated in the collaborative shared experience and practices spanning a wide range of institutional sizes and types. Their advice in brief: deploy simple but uniform project intake processes, standardize evaluation frameworks, and structure prioritization body participation to prevent gaming or circumvention of the approval process.
Ad hoc project intake processes allow project requests to stream into the IT organization from many directions, making it difficult to assemble a complete picture of project demand or to allocate resources efficiently or fairly. To set the stage for effective project prioritization, CIOs must first clean up and rationalize legacy project pipelines that have become unmanageable.
The next step is to implement intake processes that collect all project requests and capture sufficient information about them to permit evaluation and prioritization. The reformed intake processes must be transparent and straightforward, so that customers aren’t tempted to bypass them. Read our executive brief to learn more about managing the IT project pipeline.
Actions that…