CSIT214/CSIT883

IT Project Management

Introduction to Project Management

Why is project management important?
 Large amounts of money are spent on ICT
◼ The UK government in 2003-4 spent £2.3 billion on
contracts for ICT and only £1.4 billion on road building
◼ E.g. the Australian government spends about $8 billion
on ICT in 2022.

 A project often fails – Standish Group claim:

◼ 1/3 of ICT projects are successful.
◼ 82% were late and
◼ 43% exceeded their budget.

 Poor project management is a major factor in these failures

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What is a project?
Some dictionary definitions:
“A specific plan or design”
“A planned undertaking”
“A large undertaking e.g. a public works
scheme”

Key points above are planning and size of

task

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Jobs versus projects

‘Jobs’ – repetition of very well-defined

and well understood tasks with very
little uncertainty
‘Exploration’ – e.g. finding a cure for
cancer: the outcome is very uncertain
Projects – in the middle!
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Characteristics of projects
A task is more ‘project-like’ if it is:
 Non-routine
 Planned
 Aiming at a specific target
 Carried out for a customer
 Carried out by a temporary work group
 Involving several specialisms
 Made up of several different phases
 Constrained by time and resources
 Large and/or complex
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Pen and paper exercise
 Which of the following is a project? Put them in an order
mostly closely matching your ideas of what constitutes a
project.
1. Producing an edition of a newspaper
2. Putting robot vehicle on Mars to search for the signs of life
(e.g. NASA's Mars rover Curiosity)
3. Getting married
4. Writing an operating system
5. Evolving Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” to Android 4.0 “Jelly
Bean”
6. A research project into synchronizing design models and
code.
7. Installing a new version of eLearning for a university
8. A CSIT214/883 assignment.
Examples of IT Projects (1 of 2)
 A team of students creates a smartphone
application and sells it online
 A company develops a driverless car
 A government group develops a system to
track child immunizations
 A global bank acquires other financial
institutions and needs to consolidate
systems and procedures
Examples of IT Projects (2 of 2)
 Top Strategic Technologies for 2024
Are IT projects really different from other
projects?
Not really …but
 Invisibility
◼ E.g. Building a software vs. building a house.
 Complexity
 Conformity
 Flexibility
make software more problematic to build
than other engineered artefacts.

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Contract management versus technical project
management
Projects can be:
 In-house: clients and developers are
employed by the same organization
 Out-sourced: clients and developers
employed by different organizations
◼ ‘Project manager’ could be:
 a ‘contract manager’ in the client organization
 a technical project manager in the
supplier/services organization

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Project Constraints
What is Project Management? (1 of
2)
 Project management is “the application
of knowledge, skills, tools and
techniques to project activities to
meet project requirements” (PMBOK®
Guide, Sixth Edition, 2017)
 Project managers strive to meet the triple
constraint (project scope, time, and cost
goals) and also facilitate the entire
process to meet the needs and
expectations of project stakeholders
What is Project Management? (2 of
2)
Activities covered by project management

Feasibility study
Is project technically and organizationally feasible and
worthwhile from a business point of view?
Planning
Only done if project is feasible
Execution
Implement plan, but plan may be changed as we go along
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Stakeholders
 Stakeholders (SH) are persons or organizations.
They may be affected by it either directly or
indirectly.

 Stakeholders may include:

◼ anyone who operates the system
◼ anyone who benefits from the system
◼ anyone involved in purchasing or procuring the system.
◼ organizations which regulate aspects of the system
◼ people or organizations opposed to the system
◼ organizations responsible for systems which interface
with the system under design

 Different stakeholders may have

15 different objectives – need
to define common project objectives
Paper and Pen exercise
A patient information system for mental health care
 A MHC-PMS (Mental Health Care-Patient Management System) to
support mental health care is a medical information system that
maintains information about patients suffering from mental health
problems and the treatments that they have received.
 Individual care management: Clinicians can create records for
patients, edit the information in the system, view patient history, etc. The
system supports data summaries so that doctors can quickly learn about
the key problems and treatments that have been prescribed.
 Patient monitoring: The system monitors the records of patients who
are involved in treatment and issues warnings if possible problems are
detected.
 Administrative reporting: The system generates monthly management
reports showing the number of patients treated at each clinic, the
number of patients who have entered and left the care system, the
number of patients sectioned, the drugs prescribed and their costs, etc.
Paper and pen exercise (cont.)
Who could be a stakeholder in the MHC-PMS?
 Patients whose information is recorded in the system.
 Doctors who are responsible for assessing and treating patients.
 Nurses who coordinate the consultations with doctors and administer some
treatments.
 Medical receptionists who manage patients’ appointments.
 IT staff who are responsible for installing and maintaining the system.
 A medical ethics manager who must ensure that the system meets current
ethical guidelines for patient care.
 Health care managers who obtain management information from the
system.
 Medical records staff who are responsible for ensuring that system
information can be maintained and preserved, and that record keeping
procedures have been properly implemented.
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Project Success
 There are several ways to define project
success:
◼ The project met scope, time, and cost goals
◼ The project satisfied the customer/sponsor
◼ The results of the project met its main
objective, such as making or saving a certain
amount of money, providing a good return on
investment, or simply making the sponsors
happy
Setting objectives
 Answering the question ‘What do we have
to do to have a success?’

 Need for a project authority (project

ownership)
◼ Sets the project scope
◼ Allocates/approves costs

◼ Could be one person - or a group (e.g. Project

Steering Committee).

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Objectives
Informally, the objective of a project can be
defined by completing the statement:
The project will be regarded as a success
if……….
e.g. “customers can order our products
online”.

Focus on what will be put in place, rather

than how activities will be carried out
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Objectives should be SMART
 S – specific, that is, concrete and well-defined
◼ E.g. “to improve customer satisfaction”???
 M – measurable, that is, the satisfaction of the objective
can be objectively judged
◼ E.g. “to reduce customer complaints”???
 A – achievable, that is, it is within the power of the
individual or group concerned to meet the target
◼ E.g. “to send humans to Mars”???
 R – relevant, the objective must be relevant to the true
purpose of the project
 T – time-constrained: there is a defined point in time by
which the objective should be achieved

E.g. “upgrade the helpdesk telephone system by December

31 to achieve average client wait
21 times of no more than two
minutes”
Sub-objectives
These are steps along the way to achieving
the objective
Informally, these can be defined by
completing the sentence
To reach objective X, the following must be
in place
A……………
B……………
C…………… etc

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Paper and pen exercise
 Which of the following objective statements
would meet the SMART criteria? If not, how
would you improve them?
1. To implement the new application on time within
budget
2. To implement the new software application with
the fewest possible software errors that might
lead to operation failures.
3. To design a system that is user-friendly.
4. To provide full documentation for the new
system.
Measures of effectiveness
How do we know that the objective has
been achieved?
By a practical test, that can be objectively
assessed.
e.g. for user satisfaction with software
product:
◼ Repeat business – they buy further products
from us
◼ Number of complaints
 Will explore more in Quality Management
lecture
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The business case
Benefits Benefits of
delivered project
must outweigh
Costs
costs
Costs include:
$ - Development
- Operation
$
Benefits
Quantifiable
Non-quantifiable
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Project success and failure
 Project objectives vs. Business objectives
 Project objectives are the targets that the
project team is expected to deliver:
◼ The agreed functionality
◼ The required level of quality
◼ On time
◼ Within budget.
Project success/failure
 Degree to which objectives are met
scope (of functionalities)

time cost

In general if, for example, project is running out

of time, this can be recovered for by reducing
scope or increasing costs.

Similarly costs and scope can be protected by

adjusting other corners of the ‘project triangle’.
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Other success criteria
These can relate to longer term, less directly
tangible assets
 Improved skill and knowledge
 Creation of assets that can be used on
future projects e.g. software libraries
 Improved customer relationships that lead
to repeat business

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Pen and paper exercise
 A college currently has payroll processing carried
out by a services company. This is very
expensive and does not allow detailed analysis of
personnel data to be carried out. Decision has
been made to bring payroll ‘in-house’ by
acquiring an ‘off-the-shelf’ application and do the
service themselves.
Identify the objectives and sub-objectives of the
college’s payroll project. What measures of
effectiveness could be used to check the success in
achieving the objectives of the project.
What is management?
This involves the following activities:
 Planning – deciding what is to be done
 Organizing – making arrangements
 Staffing – selecting the right people for
the job
 Directing – giving instructions

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What is management?
(continued)
 Monitoring – checking on progress
 Controlling – taking action to remedy hold-
ups
 Innovating – coming up with solutions
when problems emerge
 Representing – liaising with clients, users,
developers and other stakeholders

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Example: a day at work for the project manager
 “Paul Duggan is the manager of a software development department. On
Tuesday at 10:00am he and his fellow department heads have a meeting with
their group manager about the staffing requirements for the coming year.
Paul has already drafted a document “bidding” for staff. This is based on work
planned for his department for the next year. The document is discussed at
the meeting. At 2:00pm, Paul has a meeting with his senior staff about an
important project his department is undertaking. One of the programming
staff has just had a road accident and will be in hospital for some time. It is
decided that the project can be kept on schedule by transferring another team
member from less urgent work to this project. A temporary replacement is to
be brought in to do the less urgent work but this may take a week or so to
arrange. Paul has to phone both the human resources manager about getting
a replacement and the user for whom the less urgent work is being done,
explaining why it is likely to be delayed.”

Identify which of the management responsibilities that Paul was

responding to at different points during his day.
 Management control
Data – the raw details
e.g. ‘5,000 premises (e.g. houses)
passed by NBN fibre at Kiama’
Information – the data is processed
to produce something that is
meaningful and useful
e.g. ‘productivity is 100 premises
a day’
Comparison with objectives/goals
e.g. we will not meet target of
rolling out NBN for Illawarra by
31st March 2014

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Management control - continued
Modelling – working out
the probable outcomes of
various decisions
e.g. if we employ 200
more staff at
Wollongong how
quickly can we get the
NBN fibre installed?
Implementation –
carrying out the remedial
actions that have been
decided upon
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Pen and paper exercise
 An ICT project is to replace locally held paper-based
records with a centrally organized database. Staff in a large
number of offices that are geographically dispersed need
training and will then have to use the new ICT system to
setup the backlog of manual records on the new database.
The system cannot properly operational until the last record
has been transferred. The new system will only be
successful if a new transactions can be processed within a
certain times cycles.

Identify the data that you would collect to ensure that during
execution of the project, things were going to plan.