3.6 Planning and prioritization approaches

The practices exhibited in the following Hewlett Packard case are typical of the better practitioners of planning and prioritization. Even so, it is fairly clear that there is plenty of opportunity for improvement.

• In 1998 the IT department of the Test and Measurement Organization (TMO) within Hewlett Packard had relatively rudimentary project assessment processes in place. According to Steve Hussey, TMO Information Technology Manager:

  I would characterize our assessment here as being pretty much on the front end of the learning curve. Most are not very sophisticated. The reason I say that is because on large investments, assessments tend to be more robust, and there's always a financial component. Increasingly, there is a business strategy, business impact component and on the end of the spectrum, for smaller projects, there is often little return analysis in the traditional sense at all, because those projects may move very quickly, and there's not a lot of analytical framework around them. However, almost all projects go through a fairly disciplined project lifecycle process.

He does note that the decision process differs, depending on the part of the investment portfolio under consideration. For instance:

At the highest level, overall infrastructure strategies are supported by the senior level executives in the business; the infrastructure investment is usually not based on a return to the business in the more traditional sense There's a different set of investments that I would term project or solution based, and those decisions...