DECIDING WHICH PROJECT TO KEEP,
A CRITICAL PART OF A PROJECT MANAGER'S JOB

27 November 2001

In a time of economic belt tightening, many IT projects are bearing the brunt, with fewer people and less money to complete the work. Project managers are now faced with the critical decision of choosing which projects to keep and which to kill.

Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Johanna Rothman offers tips on how to decide:

• Don't finish projects just because you started them. Instead, make sure those projects are sufficiently important to the people who will pay for them.
  
  
• Define what's strategically important to your customers. When you do that, you will also define what your customers don't want. Then ruthlessly kill those projects and all the work associated with them.
  
  
• Define the value of the work in dollars, then define the cost of the work. If the cost of the work is higher than the value, stop doing the work.
  
  
• Simplify a project. If you have projects over schedule, over budget, or over featured, ask yourself how little you can do (simplify) and still get the benefit of the project.
  
  
• Kill projects you just no longer need to do. Even if you've kept some of these projects because of their political value, it's time to shed them now.
  
  

"Not all projects should be done. Look at projects strategically, and align the business goals with the projects you have to complete," concludes Rothman. "However, you don't necessarily want to lay off the people associated with the projects you don't want to keep. Instead, consider which people you want to retain and which projects you need to retain."

--Cutter Consortium

[This information was excerpted from a recent Business-IT Strategies Advisory Service Executive Update. For more information, please contact Dennis Crowley at +1 781 641 5125 or +1 800 964 5125 or e-mail dcrowley@cutter.com or visit http://www.cutter.com/consortium/index_bit.html.]