TABLE OF CONTENTS The business case for adapting project management disciplines to large-scale software development is obvious. The devil is in the details.
Corporate America spends more than $275 billion each year on approximately 200 000 application software development projects. A great many of these projects will fail for lack of skilled project management.
The opportunities for project failure are legion. Large-scale software development efforts today are conducted in complex, distributed IT environments. Development occurs in a fragile matrix of applications, users, customer demands, laws, internal politics, budgets, and project and organizational dependencies that change constantly. Project managers who lack enterprise-wide multi-project planning, control, and tracking tools often find it impossible to comprehend the system as a whole. Underestimating project complexity and ignoring changing requirements are basic reasons why projects fail. Under these conditions, software project management is almost an oxymoron.
Moreover, software today must not just automate processes; it must create business value, by improving customer service or delivering a competitive advantage. Raising the stakes of every large-scale development project is return on investment (ROI): software must have a measurable impact on a company s bottom line.
Finally, urgent multi-project, multi-site projects like Y2K, Euro conversion, ERP, and the rush to the Internet add to the daunting development burden.
For all these reasons, the business case for adapting project management disciplines to large-scale software development is obvious. It s the implementation that s dicey.
Project management is a process that spans the full life cycle of a project from...
