Part I indicated a continued shift toward smaller IT budgets and projects from those in our 2001 survey. We also saw a greater emphasis placed on hitting IT project budgets. Here we'll concentrate our efforts on the influence of lifecycle models and project requirements on project success and quality.

Do your development projects consistently fail to meet deadlines and overspend on budgets? In effect, do they cause angst from the CEO's office on down? There are many ways to increase IT performance. Unfortunately, almost all of them take lots of time, lots of money, or lots of both. The 10 actions below, however, are different. Each can be taken today, and each is cheap. (Nothing is free.)

For many IT organizations in today's economic climate, creating bang for the buck is critical. Projects are closely scrutinized for reasonable returns and rapid payback periods. One of the identified benefits of agile methodologies is the improved ROI through the earlier capture of benefits. First, iterative development can result in early features deployment. In a 10-iteration, 10-month project, enough functionality could be present by, say, iteration four to begin implementation.

During the late 1980s, my biggest client was Pacific Bell. At that time, PacBell was a wonderful place to work. Following the bust-up of AT&T, PacBell was liberated to do its own thing. So here you had this huge company on its own for the first time. Everything was new, and people were willing to try new things. I worked with the folks at PacBell to create new ways of developing software and to perfect methods and tools to facilitate that process. But this article is not about that effort.

A question for many agile software development teams is, what is the project manager's role during an iteration? If the team is managing its own work assignments and is accountable for results, what does the project manager do other than stay out of the way and occasionally buy pizza on Friday?

This month, CBR begins a two-part series on a subject of great importance in IT management: the management of projects. This month, we'll focus on methods, models, and practices -- the "hard" stuff. Next month, we'll turn to the "soft" stuff -- staffing, morale, team management, and relationship management. If you are a longtime reader of CBR , you'll recall that we dealt with project management two years ago, and you'll recognize Cutter Consortium Fellow Robert Charette's "husbandry" approach to the subject.