Enterprise and Conventional Project Management

By Raul Bernardino

Introduction:

Nowadays, the Information Technology Project Management becomes more intense of using the project management knowledge in order to overcome the failures in the Information Technology projects in the past experience as a lesson learned and prepare for the better of the Information Technology projects management planning in the future. 

What is the Project? There are several attributes of the project can define more as follows:

1. A project has a unique purpose or idea whereas it has a clear define the objective of the project.
2. A project is temporary, whereas it has start and end time, e.g. less than two years (one month or two months of the project period).
3. A project is elaborated and developed by using progressive mode, whereas it has to adjust to the need when move along with the project, e.g. at the very beginning it may has more broad definition or objective however when move along the project it might find the tone and has more specifics and clear of the details.
4. A project requires the resources, whereas it has from various resources such as human resources (people), cost, other means like hardware and software, etc.
5. A project has to have sponsor or primary customer, stakeholders etc., for instance the sponsorship has to give a direction to the project manager on how the project output would be.
6. A project involves uncertainly as well, whereas it has uniqueness and it is difficult to predict the life time of the project.

The project manager has to be effective in managing those attributes above including managing a project team and follow the direction or guidance from project sponsor in order to meet the of project goal.

Project Management is “the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to project activities to meet project requirements” (Schwalbe, 2010, p. 10)

In order to manage the project to be success, she or he, the project manager has to be dealing with a specific project and focusing on project goals whereas it is short term goals and it is relating to a particular project and not to mix with the other project activities.  It has to be concentrate in the trip constraint of the project.

The triple constrains as follows:

1. Scope:  What activities or works are need to be done in the project, what results that are expected to have, and how those activities are verify the need of customers or sponsor
2. Time: How long the period of the project to be completed, how team delivery tasks in the schedule, and who can approve  changes is if schedule time is not meet
3. Cost: How much the cost for the project to be completed, how cost will be analyzed, who can approve the budget if there is a change; 

The Enterprise Project Management is a systematic approach, in order to achieve the organization goals via the continuation of one basis of the project whereas involving the organizational strategies, transforming business activities, improving the operation to be effective, including the developing a project traditionally.

The Enterprise Project Management is a tool to enable the organizations or companies have better management in managing the resources, like as technology, people and processes and also have an efficient collaboration and consistent of project reporting to the managerial lines in the organization or company.

This tool also helps to have better performance and understanding in the project planning whereas fit with system development life cycle (SDLC).

The traditional project management has four main stage of project life time. They are:

• Concept: in which is coming from system analyst, end user or some one’s idea as a base to develop the system application for instance.
• Development: in which is system analyst, business analyst, designer, coder, and tester have to develop and prototype the application.
• Implementation: in which is the end users will confirm the features and developer doing maintenance for the changing or new version etc., including the project teams are responsible for the implementation starting from prototype, testing mode and production mode.
• Closeout: There are many issues are involving in the closing out of the project. For instance regulation changed, requirement changed, new technology etc.

In conclusion: Lot of agency or companies now is using the enterprise project management to minimize the project cost.

Annexes:

References list:

1. Schwalbe, K. Information Technology Project Management, Revised 6th edition
2. Microsoft Leadership in Enterprise Project Management Microsoft Office EPM Solution Customer Research Report [online]. Available from: http://www.epmsolutions.net/assets/solutions/epm_customer_research.pdf  (Accessed Date: May 6, 2011)
3. Enterprise Project Management [online]. Available from: http://www.scribd.com/doc/35561435/Enterprise-Project-Management-EPM (Accessed Date: May 6, 2011)