Project Management
Each week, you will be asked to respond to the prompt or prompts in the discussion forum. Your initial post should be a minimum of 300 words in length, and you should respond to two additional posts from your peers.
Explain why IT projects (such as Web site development or redesign) are less likely to be delivered on time and within budget than large building construction projects. Include a discussion of how project management software can help IT project managers achieve their goals.
CHAPTER 12 MANAGINGELECTRONIC COMMERCE IMPLEMENTATIONS
Summary
This chapter provides an overview of managing electronic commerce implementations. The first step is setting overall goals for the implementation. More specific objectives derive from these overall goals and include planned benefits and planned costs. The benefit and cost objectives should be stated in measurable terms, such as dollars or quantities, and they should be linked to the organization’s business strategies. Before undertaking any online business initiative, companies should evaluate the initiative’s estimated costs and benefits. Some costs, such as opportunity costs, can be difficult to identify and estimate. Funding for online business implementations can come from internal sources in midsize or large firms. Small new businesses can be funded from personal savings or loans and investments made by family and friends. As the startup increases in size, it can turn to angel investors and, eventually, venture capitalists before turning to a public offering of its stock. The most common evaluation technique for online business initiatives is ROI. The benefits of electronic commerce projects can be harder to define and quantify in monetary units than the benefits expected from most other IT projects, so managers should be careful when using quantitative measures such as ROI to evaluate electronic commerce projects. Companies must decide how much, if any, of an electronic commerce project to outsource. Forming an internal team that includes knowledgeable individuals from within the company is a good first step in developing an outsourcing strategy. The internal team develops the specific project objectives and is responsible for meeting those objectives. The internal team can select from specific strategies, such as using incubators or outsourcing various parts of the project, and should supervise the staffing of any part of the project that is to be developed internally. Project management is a formal way to plan and control specific tasks and resources used in a project. It provides project managers with a tool they can use to make informed trade-offs among the project elements of schedule, cost, and performance. Large organizations are beginning to use project portfolio management techniques to track and make trade-offs among multiple ongoing projects. Electronic commerce initiatives are usually completed within a short time frame and thus are less likely to run out of control than other information systems development projects. The company must staff the electronic commerce implementation regardless of whether portions of the project are outsourced. Critical staffing areas include business management, application specialists, customer service staff, systems administration, network operations staff, social network marketing staff, and database administration. A good way for all participants to learn from project experiences is to conduct a postimplementation audit that compares project objectives to the actual results.
