Cognos solutions for information technology

Are projects on time, on budget, on target?

Most IT departments have hundreds of separate projects that are interrelated, overlapping or at various stages of completion. The Project/SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) Management decision area tracks the status of major projects against common project management milestones such as scope, requirements analysis, design specifications, development, testing, implementation and production.

Monitoring on-time, on-budget, on-quality project indicators is critical to managing scope, unplanned changes and necessary adjustments for better performance. This information, which may need to be aggregated from several sources, also improves alignment around project priorities and helps flag duplication in purpose or scope.

To help with this analysis, the Project/SDLC Management decision area lets you set planning goals and scorecarding metrics for performance mangement elements such as:

• IT project completion (%).
• IT project lead time (#).
• IT project ROI ($).
• External & internal resource days (#).
• New initiatives & initiatives rejected (#).
• IT project cost & value ($).
• Project duration & variance (#).

With a performance management system in this decision area, you can analyze these goals and metrics by a number of dimensions, including:

• Investment amount (< $50K, < $100K, < $500K, > $1M, etc.).
• Complexity (features, information, architecture).
• Dynamic versus static.
• Business scope (point solution, departmental or enterprise).
• Critical skills required.
• Risk level (likelihood and impact assessments).

Using the Project/SDLC Management decision area

As an IT professional, the Project/SDLC Management decision area let you ask questions such as:

• Project duration: Where are the greatest percentage and absolute variances for projects based on department and project team?
• Internal/external resource days: What is the trend in internal and external resource days for project complexity? How are we using our own team?
• IT project ROI: What return do we see on projects based on their complexity and risk level?

A key benefit from this decision area is gaining insights even from failed projects. By seeing what worked and what didn't across many different projects, and by ensuring a full life-cycle perspective on development projects, you can avoid future mistakes and resource misallocations.

This information sweet spot helps manage expectations across the team, sponsors and stakeholders. IT can avoid project cost overruns, missed deadlines and subpar quality deliverables. Beyond avoiding the adverse financial implications of failed projects, it also helps IT avoid the potentially serious impact on the company's reputation and credibility.