IT Project Prioritization and Planning:
Managing the Demand for new IT Services
by Ken Rau
Description
What is to be done when the Businesss reach exceed its grasp, i.e. when the sum of identified IT opportunities, qualified projects, and existing system development efforts exceed the available IT resources required for their simultaneous pursuit?
This seminar provides practical, proven methods, tools and techniques for rigorously and methodically evaluating and ranking proposed and existing initiatives and arranging them into a practical, consensus-based, time-phased plan for proceeding.
Attendees learn how to evaluate projects in a consistent manner that allows for comparison, ranking and scheduling in a multiple-project environment. Evaluation criteria considered include: return on investment, technological risk, Business impact and need. Techniques and tools for evaluating projects against multiple criteria are explored, discussed and applied in practical exercises.
Attendees learn important strategies for involving a broad cross-section of the organization in the process in order to achieve user consensus and Management commitment to resulting project prioritization. Methods for subsequently engineering projects into an IT long range project plan are described. Finally, attendees learn how to employ the same techniques used for initially evaluating and ranking projects to refresh and maintains the plans viability in perpetuity.
The seminar features hands-on exercises where in attendee results can be compared to the actual results developed by organizations that were faced with the planning dilemmas presented.
While several different organizations prioritization and planning results are presented to demonstrate the diversity and variety of challenges and solutions possible, the two day seminar features a recurring case study of a single organization that was faced with having to prioritize over a hundred identified IT opportunities into a multi-year, consensus-based IT plan.
Attendees struggle with the issues that confronted this real-life organization and learn how each prioritization, planning, funding and process challenge was met and resolved.
Main Topics
- Introduction and Course Overview
- Estimating the Impact of a Project on Business Strategy
- Using Return on Investment to Prioritize Projects
- Other Criteria for Ranking Projects
- Multi-Criteria-Based Prioritization of Projects
- Engineering the IT Strategic Plan
- Funding the Engineered Plan
- Establishing the On-Going IT Strategic Planning Process
- Seminar Summary and Close