READ THE CASELET AND ANSWERALL QUESTIONS Your IT Project Has Been Backlogged Everyone at The Queen's Medical Center in Honolulu wants some shiny new piece of technology. Doctors and nurses who have seen a new pharmacy management system demonstrated at a recent conference think the hospital should have it. An administrator wants his department to have PDAs for wireless access to e-mail. Someone else wants a hospital-wide dietary management system but doesn't have the budget to fund it. All of these people want Chief Information Officer (CIO) and vice president of IT Ken Kudla to get it all for them. Yet before he even thinks about eking new systems out of his $13 million annual operating budget, Kudla has to contend with the 30 projects he has going on right now. He's in the middle of upgrading the hospital's network and deploying an anti-spam management system. He's due to replace the seven different systems that make up his hospital information system. Meanwhile, he's trying to finish a document imaging project begun back in 2002, for which funding has been scarce. How CIOs manage this burgeoning demand has a direct impact on whether or not business leaders view IT as responsive to their needs. The challenge for CIOs, then, is to ensure that projects already in the queue are aligned with ever-changing business priorities, to manage business-side expectations, and to control new sources of application demand from today's more sophisticated users. Whatever the source of the application backlog, CIOs should follow this cardinal rule. Don't complain; nobody- especially your CEOlikes a whiner. To some extent, backlogs have always been around because users have always cried for the latest applications. Ten years ago, during the Internet build-out, everyone got what they wanted. Then Y2K put the brakes on many less-critical projects. Then came the dot.com bust, 9/11, and bad times for many companies. Still, application demand remained. There may have been less development during the years when companies were focused on survival and keeping costs down, but users "still had their wish lists," says Stephen Rood, CIO of Strategic Technology. How one defines and deals with any backlog boils down to two factors: the source of the demand and the project's stage of development. Holstein identifies two different types of backlogs: a backlog of desire (applications that users are yearning for) and a backlog of commitment (projects that are approved but not started). CIOs need to pay attention to both. When projects have been promised but not delivered, he says, "expectations have been set and not fulfilled." It may be that an IT organization hasn't planned properly, or that managers aren't tracking projects well, or that developers are taking time to assess the ins and outs of a project. Whatever the reason, users have not gotten what they were promised. One way to look at the backlog is to consider the whole spectrum of projects that IT is currently working on but has not finished, in addition to the ones ready to go. Powers has a list of 100 projects at Worldspan that have funding and that IT has started. Outside the top 100 are projects that are on deck. "When you finish [project] three, you bring in [project] 101," she explains. If she doesn't have the right staff with the right skills available for the next project on the list, she may skip to another. "We tend to have a backlog of about one year's worth of work. But because we prioritize every two weeks, some items never make it to the active list," Powers says. No matter how good CIOs are at keeping a grip on their backlog, ever-shifting business priorities always threaten to shake up the IT agenda. One of the toughest tasks for CIOs is to align the jumble of projects vying for resources with the company's strategic needs. In a fast-paced business climate, new projectsespecially those that come from the top floor-scream for attention. "They can also come about quite innocently," Holstein says, due to external factors that cause the business climate to shift. "What was a top priority becomes priority number 10." At The Queen's Medical Center, Kudla wages a constant battle to ensure that all of his constituents know that every IT project has to be in sync with the center's strategic initiatives. As a member of the senior management team, he considers it his most important task to make sure his peers are aware of and agree to the center's priorities. Everyone, from senior executives on down, should know that a pharmacy management system is important for the hospital; they should also understand that rolling out the wireless PDAs for e-mail is "low on my food chain." Kudla of The Queen's Medical Center expects that once he upgrades the hospital's seven major systems, new demand will surface."Once the system is stabilized and users realize the potential of the new system, I anticipate a demand for new functionality," he says. Kudla anticipates requests for, among other things, automating the capture of data from patient monitors and expansion of wireless access on the hospital campus. In other words, the application backlog isn't a problem one solves, it's a condition one lives with as technology matures and expands into new areas of the business, enabling growth and greater efficiency. "Of course, working harder and more funding help," concludes Worldspan's Powers. Source: Adapted from Thomas Wailgum, "The Number One Problem of CIOs: The Project Backlog," CIO Magazine, December 11, 2007. QUESTION 1 [50 MARKS] 1.1 Despite all the excellent advice available to CEOs and CIOs, more than half of the major (25) projects undertaken by companies still fail or get cancelled. Critically explore and discuss ten common reasons for failure of projects in a specific industry of your choice or the caselet itself. List your sources. 1.2 (25) Critically compare and contrast the three types of project management offices (PMO) with regards to forms existing in various organizations and their functions. Discuss their application with reference to an organization of your choice or the caselet