Improved project management practices as a key to the successful IS implementation

1. Improved project management practices as a key to the successful IS implementation Željka Požgaj*, Hrvoje Sertić** and Alen Škatar *** *Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Zagreb, J.F.Kennedy Square 6, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia **Ericsson Nikola Tesla d.d., Research & Development Center, Krapinska 45, 10002 Zagreb, Croatia ***Sales department, T-HT d.d. - Region 3 west, Ciottina 17a, 51000 Rijeka, Croatia

2. Content • Introduction • Project manager's role in development organization • Method for improved project management • Results of the method application • Conclusion

3. Introduction • Project organization for the IS development is a highly demanding task • Traditional project organization methods are no longer suitable to answer all challenges and quickly respond to change requests • This work: • analyzes typical project organization practices • proposes method to organize IS development projects • evaluates proposed method on the actual project • Two main goals: • efficiently use all available competences • provide a way to implement changes during the project execution

4. Project manager's role in development organization • Typical development projects: • some sort of formal organization with high-level roles and responsibilities • Project Manager assigned to the project • frequent changes of development area and used technologies • Analyzed areas: • project planning • knowledge utilization and role assignments • requirement definition • change management

5. Project manager's role in development organization • Identified problems caused by: • poor project planning (not based on realistic estimations or prior experience) • complicated project plans with too much details • changes during implementation and customer change requests not handled properly • unnecessary use of state-of-the-art technologies • poor project communication • inadequate role assignments • lack of knowledge about actual competences • lack of information about project environment • poor requirement management practice • poor change management

6. Method for improved PM • Defines activities aimed to enable efficient IS implementation • Focused to: • Preparation of development project • Execution of implementation activities • quick response to change requests

7. Resultsof method application • Method was applied on the development project in the ETK Company • development of IS aimed to provide statistics information for mobile operator’s • Development project • involved 24 developers located on four sites • preparation phase and three development iterations • Focus on the environment analysis resulted with • in-depth analysis of actual development constraints • several organizational decisions • all members aware of actual project goals, schedule, their role and actual customer expectations at the project start.

8. Resultsof method application • Each development iteration: • organized according to the experiences from the previous one • project plans were constantly adjusted • significant number of change requests • major impact on project execution and required additional effort for implementation • all change requests implemented in short time frame • all planned tests were performed despite occurred problems in the code design • included retrospective activities resulted with several valuable improvements in project organization

9. Conclusion • Efficient utilization of available competences and well-organized development activities are mandatory for IS development • Traditional project management practices are no longer suitable • project must answer large amount of change requests in short time frame • Development and test activities must be constantly coordinated • Proposed method: • enables project managers to focus to the important organizational issues • creates efficient project organization • provides foundation for quick response to change requests • Achieved results: • project organization can be constantly improved through the project, therefore resulting with better IS implementation