Executive's Guide to IT Governance: Improving Systems Processes with Service Management, COBIT, and ITIL

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

IT Governance Issues: Project and Program Management

WHILE ENTERPRISES MANAGE MOST OF THEIR ACTIVITIES through formal organization chart structures, a significant group of enterprise activities are organized and managed as projects. A term that is used in science, governmental, or even in school activities, a project is a collaborative activity within an enterprise, involving such activities as research or IT development. Projects are specially planned to achieve a particular aim, and contrasted with enterprise regular activities, projects are usually defined as having a temporary rather than permanent organizational structure. They are constituted by teams within or across organizations to accomplish particular tasks under time constraints.

Many IT systems development efforts are organized and managed as projects, and when an enterprise or its IT function is faced with managing a series of similar but different projects, those groupings are called programs. Projects and programs are often effective ways to manage and implement IT systems and process changes, but they also can cause some governance and control problems since they are efforts that typically cross regular organizational boundaries and require special monitoring and project control mechanisms.

This chapter will consider effective project and program management techniques with an objective of improving overall IT governance. We will introduce the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK) standards ...