Critical Success Factors In IT Project Management

Critical Success Factors in IT Project Management

By Jianing Wu 300365997

Introduction

IT Project management is the method of planning, organizing and outlining responsibility to develop an organizations’ specific information technology (IT) goals. IT project management includes managing projects for software development, hardware installations, network upgrades, cloud computing, virtualization rollouts, business analytics, data management projects and implementing IT services (Rouse, 2015). However, not all of the IT project managers can finish their jobs as a preconceived way, and that leads to three key critical factors that can make the project’s success- clearly defined roles and responsibilities, risk management and process for

Risk management is critical as it provides project managers with a forward-looking view of both the threats that could throw the project off and the opportunities to improve it. Risk management methods also provide project teams with a chance to engage the working community, such as project sponsors and users, who could control the risks that might threaten a project.

The US Census Bureau - field data collection automation is a failure case for lack of risk management. As the US decennial census is a big task which will cost a big amount of human and material resources. To minimize the total cost, the US Census Bureau decided to undertake a new way to do this job. However, the result was not as they excepted, the new technology turned out to be more complicated than anticipated. Lack of proper risk management on behalf of the Bureau and failure to establish effective communications with the suppliers resulted in a significant number of missing requirements. The failure of the project led to the Bureau having to ask for another addition three billion in funding to complete the work by using the existing standard