Early Risk Assessment in IT Projects PDF Download

Author: Hazel A. Taylor
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Information technology
Languages : en
Pages : 23

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Book Description
There is an abundance of research advice and practitioner guidance on how to manage risk in information technology (IT) projects. It seems that everyone knows what they should do with respect to risk management, and yet the promised payoffs from following risk management procedures do not eventuate across industries and organizations, IT projects have an unenviable reputation, with projects failing outright or at least failing to live up to expectations. Does this failure result from inadequacies in the risk management guidance that organizations rely on, or is it a failure by organizations and their project managers to effectively implement this guidance? In this paper we discuss one organization's innovative approach to making IT project risk management realistic, practical, and effective. The IT project risk management approach presented here is the culmination of over five years of collaborative practice research within the Project Management Center of Excellence (PMCoE) of a large, municipal organization. The aim of the initiative was to improve the organization's IT project success rate, and the PMCoE worked through three practical action research cycles to develop and refine a new approach to early risk assessment. The approach is well founded in research findings, and the PMCoE has been able to demonstrate its effectiveness through careful monitoring of project performance data. The PMCoE's contingency-based risk assessment process provides a visual aid for surfacing overall inherent risk at the early stages of IT projects, thereby enabling the proactive implementation of strategies to establish an appropriate level of oversight and to improve foundational elements of the project when it is still malleable. The PMCoE's early risk assessment process, and the risk spider chart that is the primary tool in this assessment, involves a review of a small set of project dimensions known to be related to project performance, without requiring probability-impact estimates of individual risks, which often amount to little more than guesswork at the stages leading up to project launch. The dimension-based assessment provides an easily measurable determination of the overall risk level of a project at the very early stages of the project, and enables the PMCoE to make suggestions to improve the odds of success from the start. The risk assessment process and risk spider chart tool have now been used on over 100 projects, and the organization has been able to demonstrate a steady improvement in project metrics since 2006 when the work began. The PMCoE's early project risk assessment process is readily customizable for different organizations and project contexts, and provides a model for other organizations striving to engage in effective practices to improve IT project outcomes.