Chapter 14: Managing Projects

Just as you can analyze the benefit of purchasing a new piece of equipment for your business, you can analyze the impact of an information system. Questions to ask: Just how will it benefit the business overall? What benefits will your customers gain from the new system?

However, you can’t reduce everything to dollars and cents. Sometimes the benefits of the new system will be measured in other ways; you can use different methods to evaluate a new information system, just as you would a new storage system for widgets.

One of the more difficult choices to make when evaluating new systems is to determine the tangible benefits versus the intangible benefits. Example…When a financial institution must decide whether to offer online banking; it may evaluate the system using a method and determine that it will cost half a million dollars to implement. The immediate cost savings of not having employees deal directly with customers may be only $250,000. One might say that the new system is not worth the cost; the bank will lose $250,000. But the intangible benefits the bank customers may enjoy could potentially be worth a million dollars. In that case, the new system’s intangible benefits will far exceed the tangible benefits.

Potential new systems should be evaluated in terms of costs, tangible and intangible. All costs, hardware, software, and persware, should be included in the bottom line so that the organization can truly determine the gains, or losses, associated with the changes that will take place.

Now…just because a new system proposal looks good on paper, meets the financial model requirements, shows positive tangible and intangible benefits, and is approved by senior management, doesn’t mean it will be a success. Sometimes design, data, cost, and operations known as potential system failures can deter progress.

Ever heard the saying “If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.” If the implementation team make the project details and scope seem easy and cheap, that’s too good to be true. If the techies tell you that it will be a piece of cake, you might want to dig deeper. If the non-techies say they don’t have anything to worry about, you may want to worry.

You have to anticipate problems and be ready to solve them. No system yet designed has been problem-free. When you understand and accept that implementing a new information system shouldn’t be that different from implementing any other type of new system, you utilize some of the same principles to guide you through the process.

Communicate, communicate, communicate, up and down the chain of command. Just because you don’t tell anybody, the bad news won’t go away.

Managing the change in the organizational structure that results from implementing a new system is as important as managing the system itself. Use the appropriate internal and external integration tools to control the risk factors. Design the system implementation with the whole organization in mind allowing mostly for the human factor.