3.5 Project planning issues

Now that we have established a case for on-going risk analysis, we will examine the other dimensions of project planning. The following caselets provide detail about managers in large, complex organizations, and their approaches to feasibility assessment, planning and prioritization, and benefits management.

• The Chief Information Officer (CIO) of Genstar Container Corp (GE subsidiary) always takes the business approach in the assessment of IT investment. The IT organization has undergone a dramatic transformation since the beginning of 1997 and the assignment of Jonathan Fornaci as CIO. Since 1997, Genstar has overhauled all of its technology base and moved to an Internet/Java-based set of applications to support the customer. The first step in getting to the new vision was to subsume the technology under the business case. In the eyes of Genstar, that business case must have the singular goal of attaining closeness to the customer via the exploitation of IT. Interestingly enough, the CIO explains that the business case analysis is built solely on hard costs ; intangibles are not included.

• A large financial services organization based in the UK is moving toward an era in which all IT investments need to be about commercial ventures rather than about technology. This new perspective has contributed to making a number of key IT investment decisions, for example the decision to outsource voice and data network support and development. The IT organization determined that, while the company could easily build its own voice and data networks, it would incur...