Benefits Management: Delivering Value from IS & IT Investments

Chapter 9. From Projects to Programmes to Portfolios

So far we have discussed IS and IT investments as discrete projects, which has been the traditional way of considering and managing such activities. However, as more and more organizations have embarked on much larger scale change initiatives, often impacting the entire organization, the term 'programme' has become more widely used. Many of these change programmes are to a large extent either enabled by new IS/IT options or required significant investments in IS/IT to make them successful. Examples include the investments in enterprise-wide suites of applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM), and inter-organizational e-commerce, which were discussed in the previous chapter. In many cases it is not possible to foresee all the potential benefits or define all the changes needed at the start and the programme investment objectives and benefits will evolve as the organization learns what can, and cannot, be achieved. Also business circumstances may change during the extended time involved in completing the full implementation of the systems and business changes, requiring a reappraisal of the benefits that can be realized. The nature of large-scale IT enabled change programmes and the applicability of the benefits management approach in that context is considered in this chapter.

Governance in respect of IS/IT covers a broad spectrum of general management responsibilities for ...