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Computerworld - Mary Finlay remembers well the hectic days when her IT department was all but buried by special projects for internal customers. Business people would stop IT managers in the halls asking for favors like a system enhancement or a new module for an existing application. At one point, Finlay and her colleagues counted the number of ways in which the requests would come in. "We stopped at 100," says Finlay, deputy CIO at Partners HealthCare System Inc. in Boston. "You can literally get into a situation where you're using most of your resources responding to those kinds of requests."

Mary Finlay, deputy CIO at Partners HealthCare System Inc. Image Credit: Webb Chappell

The department didn't have a tool to track the projects that came in over the transom, so it didn't know how many were under way. Without a clear picture of the number of tasks on the docket, IT managers couldn't be sure how the extra workload was affecting scheduled work. "What happened was that one day at a time, projects would get delayed," says Finlay. "We were marginalizing resources by spreading them across the special requests plus the major initiatives."
That was four years ago. Partners HealthCare has since implemented a system for approving nonscheduled work that requires the business units to take more responsibility for prioritizing their off-plan projects.
Off-plan projects aren't new in the corporate IT environment, but the urgency of requests for them may be growing. "The speed of business today requires more responsiveness than, say, 15 years ago. There is probably a better case for an internal customer to say, 'I really need this now,' " says Kent Fourman, vice president of IT at Knoxville, Tenn.-based Housecall Medical Resources Inc.
With many CIOs reluctant to reveal how their departments handle what have sardonically been called "friends and family" requests, it is difficult to estimate how often the typical IT department is asked to sneak in a side project and how many of these requests are granted.
Some IT executives note that project-prioritization committees aren't always effective in dealing with informal appeals for projects. Finlay says that during the years when her department was awash in special requests, the department had a prioritization system, "but it only looked at where the major activity of system work occurs."
At some organizations, it's routine to bypass prioritization committees for certain requests. "Working outside the box is legitimate for most firms," says Bobby Cameron, an analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research Inc. "If you have a very fixed-budget, zero-sum-game IT