Chicken Soup for the Sick Project

Jiju ‘Jay’ Nair is a Senior Manager with Fannie Mae driving Cloud Transformation and adoption. He is an avid advocate for using innovative project and process management principles for building reliable and sustainable products.

  Applications Delivery   Business Case   Information Technology   Requirements Management   Risk Management   Schedule Management   Scheduling   Strategy  

In recent times, IT project success has become something to be celebrated and cherished as many enterprise projects have languished due to lack of direction, funds or objective. Gartner research reported that at least 30 to 40 percent of projects initiated in the United States have not completed their expected lifecycles. This statistic was compiled when projects were being initiated to resolve Year 2000 computing issues to more recent Web-based portal and virtual world projects.

IT projects vary in their dimension and size. Software development projects range from pure software as a tool to application software development and customization for business users. Here, we will limit our discussion to software development for business applications. These can be software tools ranging from point-of-sale systems to business performance management. IT infrastructure projects, on the other hand, can offer more complexity due to vendor dependency and capacity planning challenges.

For an IT project manager, setting up a project for total success becomes his first priority--whether that involves securing sufficient reserve funds or obtaining absolute commitments from the business sponsors. While preparing and planning for project success is a good way to ensure it, a whole new skill set and strategy is needed to recover an IT project from free fall. Many times, a project …

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