While e-commerce projects are not all that's going on in your IT department, managing them can be tough. What's needed is a balance between speedy and flexible development cycles, and a framework which ensures all the right boxes are ticked, including: goals, measurable (and appropriate) outcomes, and detailed reporting ( Cover story, page 18).

The experts are divided between saying you should take a less controlled collaborative approach to e-business project management (PM) and that e-business projects are no different to other strategic efforts. Managers must combine traditional project management concepts with an ability to facilitate group interaction. The completely collaborative approach would need a manager to be a highly effective communicator able to lead a distributed decision making process for a team working both in the office and online. Would this be the archetypical committee?

A practitioner, on a very large scale, who has managed to build collaborative communication into a disciplined PM environment is David Boyle, global operations and technology head for ANZ Bank. He has some 300 project managers working for him and has gone a long way towards ensuring projects don't go off track. Boyle's answer includes putting in a comprehensive project management and project billing system. This system combines with the benefit of PM certification for all managers to let Boyle's IT group give all business units timely information about what's being worked on, for how long, and so on. Boyle says this open approach gives the units more direct control over projects and outcomes, and that they are much happier. Standardised project planning and tracking technology is also in place to help project managers communicate across projects about what's working and what's not.

According to a UK survey by PA Consulting Group, organisations that "actively manage" their project portfolios will achieve much greater returns. Actively managing means that the key decision makers at the top and in the business units are routinely involved. The study showed increased returns flow from more efficient allocation of resources to projects which better fit the organisations' objectives, improved justification for overall spending and clear alignment between strategy, activity and outcomes. It's a feedback loop only set in motion once the strategy and goals are in place. One suggested means of "active" project portfolio management includes setting up a project office which formalises everything and ensures all projects have sponsors with enough clout to make them happen. This sounds bureaucratic, but it may work.

But no project management approach makes any sense unless the right projects are being worked on in the first place. For e-business projects, senior executive involvement is essential. As is the willingness to take a bit of a punt.

David_Beynon@idg.com.au

Editor in chief