Business Transformation Requires Transformational Leaders

You are a certified project manager, with some years of experience and various successful projects. Now you are invited to manage a software project in a foreign country with a team including your usual staff as well as people at the client site.

The Cutter Technology Council's Assertion #13 reads: "E-business and e-commerce will continue to fuel explosive growth in, and unending confusion about, the middleware portion of IT architectures." The purpose of this Executive Update is to consider whether there is evidence of this trend in industry today.

Today many organizations, especially in the US and Europe, execute software projects at overseas locations. These are commonly referred to as "offshore projects," and they offer attractive benefits -- leveraging the skills and resources available in the offshore country to cut costs and meet deadlines.

In the early 1990s, Russian IT companies underwent a period of fast growth, which was caused by the rapid increase in demand for their services and the material absence of competition. At that time, most such companies employed accepted project management (PM) approaches similar to those offered by BAAN, SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft.

Attending yet another project management course seems to be a common reward for being part of a failed project. However, having served as a member of project teams, a project manager, a project director, and a member of several steering committees -- and having attended a number of project management courses -- I have begun to realize that most failures have little to do with the project manager's abilities.

It's hard to open a newspaper these days and not read about the purported economic slowdown. Indeed, anything compared to the ferocious growth of the 1990s would suffer. Pressures brought about from these conditions make negotiation very difficult for IT organizations under the gun.

We recently faced a dilemma while updating our outsourcing training program: how to find out how companies are really doing with outsourcing.

Have you ever wondered if you could find out how companies are really doing with outsourcing? To answer that question, we created a list of we-always-wanted-to-know questions and conducted individual, face-to-face interviews with a select list of people who are involved in outsourcing.