Chapter 18
Managing Project Quality
For a CIO trying to manage an IT shop, there is nothing more important than project quality.
And yes, really big ticket items come along, such as acquisitions, enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations, major technology breakthroughs, and other career-making and breaking opportunities. However, in terms of operational processes that the CIO owns, none are more important than project management. Think about it: The vast majority of the bugs that shut down or impair your production applications were born in the implementation process—the project. Even if these business-impacting issues do not show up for years, the seeds were likely planted during the project phase. It could have been a missed requirement, a poorly designed interface, or a data model that is too rigid to adjust to changes in the business. These are the sorts of items that drain millions from an IT organization's expense budget each year to fix what could well have been prevented by better project quality.
So if you have a ballooning operational (expense) budget, before you start turning over rocks in your support shop, look first at your project management process and how you spend your capital. If you do not fix project management first, you might as well be standing in a sinking boat frantically bailing water instead of taking time to understand where the water is coming from and plugging the holes. Projects drive consumption of expense dollars ...
