Management Advisory Report : Information Systems Best Practices Framework

Some practitioners advocate that a project is successful if it satisfies all three legs of the triple constraint, namely, performance (specification), cost and time. This is viewed as the most basic level of project success (Greer, 1999). Thomsett (2002) in an extensive examination of 20 failing projects over a period of 18 years expands this criteria of success as: “satisfies stakeholder groups, meets functional requirements, meets quality expectations and requirements, within cost, within deadline, delivers sustained and actual benefits and provides the team with professional satisfaction and learning”.

A projects success and project managements success must be differentiated, as a project managements success can be measured by performance against quality, time and cost however a projects success can be measured by the overall projects objectives (Cooke-Davies 2002). The key criteria of a project discussed above is what the project management team and organisation together have set for the projects objective, which are the desired outcomes of the project from various aspects and stakeholders of an organisation. The following can be a standard for an organisation to follow to lessen the chance of project failure. Management must be engaged in the project and ready to support the needs of the project as top management have the resources, authority and power for implementation and as such can contribute and improve the project along the way. The project has clearly defined goals and directions with detailed specifications of the implementation process, client consultation with back and forth communication during the entire process and finally how the project is executed. Stakeholders also should agree upon success criteria of a project to ensure each stakeholders needs are met (Davis. K 2013).

The paper is divided into three sections, the first of which will establish a timeline of events. This project background will serve as a case study for the analysis in the following section that will be structured such that each of the previously mentioned facets will be independently analyzed and contrasted with project management principles. Finally the paper will conclude with a summary of the analysis and recommendations based on

What are four different approaches to improving the likelihood of success of IT projects? Hint: Understand the major characteristics of each approach.

Any successful project management, regardless of the organizational structure, is only as good as the individuals and leaders who are managing the key functions. Project management is not a single-person operation; it requires a group of individuals dedicated to the achievement of a specific goal.

2. Flexibility- There would be a great benefit of flexibility. If the time arose that we needed more sever capacity such as a storm we would have the ability to call our host company and have the sever capacity increased only for the amount of time we needed it instead of purchasing that equipment that we may not need after a storm.

2. The management difficulty covers alot of the project lifecycle except maintence. IT implementations are pose to different special challenges because there frequently are involved with new and

Team Structure- Building a proper team that is apt for the work becomes a major key to success, because the success of the project depends on the performance of the team.

At first, identifying the potential problems. Though I will pay more attention to the top three classical problems, it is necessary to analyze other potential problems in specific project by investigating similar IT projects that is “Failure” or “Success” before kicking off project. The “similar” can be explained in many aspects, such as same goals, cost, scope, same industry, background and so on. I need to investigate how such similar project fails. For example, we assume that a company want to launch an ERP projects recently. In this area, there are many companies did it before. Failure of high-profile ERP projects is common. In order to avoid mistakes that usually occurs in such IT project, it can investigate many failure projects, such as Airforce, Saudi Telecom and so on. The project failure of Airforce due to the following reasons: weak teamwork & composition and lack of top management support. The Saudi Telecom’s failure attributes to lack of top management support, inadequate of company culture, and huge system customization (Aldammas & Al-Mudimigh, 2011). As you

The critical success factors identified by Pinto and Slevin (1987) based on the survey of the literature and interviews with project and programme managers are applied in most of the projects. The extent to which these factors are present in this project have been argued below:

Pinto & Slevin (1988) developed a list of critical success factors (CSFs) that are essential to the success of any project. In the early 1990’s research was carried out based on 400 different types of projects that used these CSFs and found that these managerial, behavioural and organisational issues that remain within the control of the project manager are what contribute most highly to project success (Hamilton, 2001). These 10 critical success factors are referenced highly in project management literature:

In order to achieve their business objective, project management and the used methodology are key factor which will be responsible for the success or failure of this project.

What is project failure? The impacts of project failure? The Top 10 problems that result in project failure • The cause of the problem • How to fix the problem • How to prevent the problem from happening again

According to (Wysocki, 2007), project is defined as “a sequence of unique, complex, and connected activities having one goal or purpose and must be completed by a specific time, within budget, and according to specification”. It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the number of project failures in organisation today. Similarly Chakravorty, (2010) Points that their are over 60% failures in project, also Vitalsmart and Concours Group (2006) supports this research by stating that the percentage of failures in projects are more than 80% in general. Airbus SAS’s project of manufacturing the superjumbo jet A380 was one of those projects titled as failed.

Every organization spends billions of dollars for the success of the projects, but money alone is not the factor for the projects to be successful. From conceptualization to planning and budgeting, execution and control they take so much care for completion of projects. But, still even though how big and successful the company is they still have some projects which will fail from time to time. There are various reasons why projects fail like due to management issues, Quality issues, insufficient resources, Estimation of costs and schedules and so on. One of the main important factors to care for any project to be successful is the “Quality”. In the past few decades there are thousands of projects which