Great Expectations: How To Keep Big IT Projects On Track

Computerworld - Like other IT managers, Dom Gugliotti knows how tough it can be to properly set business executives expectations for big IT projects.

So four years ago, when Gugliottis employer, Northeast Utilities, embarked on a massive effort to consolidate three customer information systems into one and six call centers into two facilities, one of the first things that he and other project leaders did was to collocate 20 business managers with 40 IT workers to help them stay in sync on the projects products and timetables.

The closer you can get [business leaders] tied into the decision-making, the better, says Gugliotti, IT project manager for the customer service integration project in Berlin, Conn.

Gugliotti meets daily with his business peers to discuss the status of systems testing and any changes that need to be made in the project specs. IT and business live together on this, Gugliotti says of the $80 million-plus effort, which is slated to be completed in phases over the course of the year.

Meeting deadlines and staying within budgets are the most obvious challenges in any IT project, but the biggest test of all may be managing the expectations of your business clients. Its a huge challenge for IT organizations to stay aligned with the business on projects, notes Barry Cohen, vice president of applications management at Wells Real Estate Funds in Norcross, Ga.

Thats partly because business leaders and IT project managers often have different ideas from the start about the benefits a project will deliver. For example, Cohen says, business managers sometimes fail to grasp what effect IT projects will have on their operations and how much their internal business processes may have to be amended to work with new systems.

To set expectations when Wells outsourced support of its Oracle financial software beginning last May, Cohen tried to ensure that there were no communication gaps between the IT team and business leaders. He talked to business managers and staffers in formal and informal meetings, explaining that any changes made to the functionality of the software would take longer under the outsourced arrangement than when support was in-house. Its part of our normal procedure to let the business know how the changes would affect them, says Cohen.

Getting Aligned

In December, Freddie Macs CIO, Jim Hughes, began making changes to the way the companys IT organization is aligned with its businesses. Before then, each of the business units at the McLean, Va.-based mortgage purchaser had dedicated IT staffers who served as liaisons working on strategy, planning, project initiation and development. But the focus on project development overtook the other activities, says Hughes. So when he reorganized, he separated the other client-facing activities from development. That has helped Freddie Macs IT group to maintain a more consistent focus on areas such as strategy and planning with business unit leaders, he says.