School of Information Systems

IT Project Management

Project management is a set of actions that are taken in order to have a good input, process, and output upon a project. The main purpose of doing a project management is to give the project team a better planning, organizing, motivating, and controlling resources to achieve project’s goals.

Project management usually have three major factors such as time, cost, and scope. Why such project has to be determined based on their time, cost, and scope? Time will define the project of how much time is given to the project team to accomplish their project. The project team must negotiate with the company about their capability in doing the current project and the company can push the project team if it is necessary or if they think that the project can be done in a shorter time. Cost is the budgeting of the project, without cost as the factors, the project’s budget will be over and the company will have to pay such amount of money that is less needed. Cost must be well stated in the initial start up of the project as an agreement between the project manager and the company to define what are their cost sources and how much will it take. If the cost needed exceeds the plan, then there must be something wrong and the company can evaluate it with the project manager and see whether the additional fund is needed or not. Lastly, scope is defined within a project to give the project team list of actions of what they must do and achieve during a certain period of the project until the end of the project. Scope is very important because it prevents the project team to do things redundantly or even worse, they don’t know what to do in the certain time in the project. These factors are related to each other, increased scope typically means increased time and increased cost, a tight time constraint could mean increased costs and reduced scope, and a tight budget could mean increased time and reduced scope.

IT projects have its own uniqueness compared to other projects. IT project management must have several tools in order to achieve its successfulness. The project itself has several phases such as testing and implementation. Testing is considered one of the most crucial part in IT project as it will involve the users to find bugs or some inconveniences inside the system. IT project also must always be followed by user management so that the future users will be ready to use the new system as not all the users want to move from the current system to the future system.

Sugiarto Hartono