According to the Standish Group, "over half of IT projects conceived overrun their schedules and budgets, 31 percent are cancelled, and only 16 percent are completed on time".
While there are many reasons for the high failure rates, the most significant factor is poor project management and the absence of IT governance.
This week we would like to look at issues to do with IT governance and critically examine the frameworks that can enable the successful implementation and sustenance of IT projects in Zimbabwe.
With technology at the heart of most businesses, the ability to maintain tight executive and board control over IT projects throughout their lifecycle has become a deciding factor in determining which businesses thrive and which founder.
No large-scale or business critical project should ever be managed on a stand-alone basis.
The need to involve and secure buy-in from functions right across the organisation means that an IT governance approach is essential.
While project management is the key discipline within this, IT governance is broader in scope and has five inter-linked domains.
Ensuring real business value through project and business alignment entails defining, maintaining and validating the IT value proposition from the highest possible level.
In the e-Government project that was highlighted in last week's article, it is expected that every Cabinet minister that is going to be affected by the e-Government project is able to articulate the merits of the project in tandem with his goals.
Every ministry must contain a full business case with comprehensive estimates that can withstand rigorous analysis and independent audits that demonstrate linkages of the project to their individual objectives at the ministerial level.
This entails executing the value proposition throughout the life cycle of the project, and ensuring that the IT project delivers the promised benefits against the strategy.
In organisations where there is IT governance, one or more non-executive board members are made specifically responsible for oversight of progress on all business IT projects - including attending programme (or large project) board meetings.
In this way the board members can advise others to pull the plug on any non-value-adding and under performing projects.
How many IT projects in Zimbabwe are abandoned when it is too late?
A lot of resources are wasted because of lack of value assessment during project execution and this is exacerbated by the rapidity of change in the field of IT!
With sound IT governance, an organisation adopts a clearly defined risk management plan at programme and project level that reflects corporate level risk treatment requirements.
Senior corporate officers institute a monitoring framework to inform the board of progress and provide an early alert of divergence or slippage in any of the critical success factors.
Effective IT governance gains the best results from the most valuable resource - the people.
To get results quickly, companies must find the right people and form cross-departmental teams to resolve complex problems.
A centralised management of resources simplifies project administration. Managing project teams allow you to deliver consistent information to the people who are actually and potentially involved across a range of IT projects.
Project managers can easily perform searches for appropriate resources and manage people, processes, applications, infrastructure and information effectively.
This tracks and monitors strategy implementation, project progress and resource usage, to ensure clear accountability at all levels, with detailed, rigorously tested project plans based on a critical path analysis with clearly identified critical success factors, regular milestones and "go/no go" checkpoints.
An effective IT governance framework ensures that internal audit is capable and accountable directly to the board for providing regular, timely and unambiguous reports on project progress, slippage, budget, requirements specification and quality requirements.
Where there is project divergence the board should not release further funds until the cause of the divergence has been fully dealt with.
How many organisations in Zimbabwe utilise their internal audit sections to appraise IT projects and IT in general?
Where are the standards?
Many boards of Zimbabwean companies do not have IT-inclined members and as a result there are many missed opportunities to correct things.
Time has come to establish IT governance and the appointment of IT directors and CIOs (Chief Information Officers) at the board levels in order to curb IT project failures.
There are quite a few supporting references that may be useful guides to the implementation of IT governance.
Some of them are: Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT), regarded as the world's leading IT governance and control framework, and the AS8015-2005 Australian Standard for Corporate Governance of Information and Communication Technology.
Other include the ISO/IEC 38500:2008 Corporate Governance of IT and the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), a high-level framework with information on how to achieve a successful operational service management of IT.
While ITIL is not specifically focused on IT governance, the process-related information is a useful reference source for tackling the improvement of the IT service management function.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Robert Taruwona
Quelle/Source: AllAfrica, 23.05.2011
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