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The Recipe for a-Successful IT Project
Continued from page: 2
Anil Chopra
Monday, June 18, 2007
Commitment and involvement from team members
Besides the project head's own skill set, the team's skills are equally
important. Ultimately, it's the team that will deliver the work, so it's
important that you choose the right members for it.
How do you do that? What
skills should you look for besides technical expertise?
Again, while we received many responses to this, the key attributes that emerged
were that each member should be a team player and committed. The person must be
completely dedicated and committed to the job, ready to work over weekends, and
under all kinds of stress.
As one of the respondents put it, the person must have fire in the belly.
Interestingly, we also discovered that the biggest challenge IT project heads
face with their IT teams was finding the right people for it. Could there be a
link?
Negotiation skills
One key skill that's essential for any project is the ability to negotiate. It's
required at every stage of the project. Whether it's negotiating with the
management for budgets, or it's negotiating with vendors for IT equipment cost
and services, you need to have the good negotiation skills. A good negotiator
goes a long way in getting the best deal for the project.
If the IT project head doesn't possess good negotiation powers, then somebody in
the team must have. In fact, we found that only 44% of the project heads we
interacted with negotiated directly with IT vendors.
The rest had either appointed a separate person for the job, or there was a
separate purchase committee responsible for the same. Some even let their
administration department take care
of it.
Vendor management
Proper vendor management is essential to managing an IT project successfully.
Most of the large IT projects have several vendors involved, providing different
hardware, software, and services. Ensuring that they work together in harmony is
a key skill that every project head must have. The vendors should be willing to
go that extra mile to support you. For this to happen, you must ensure that all
vendors deliver their part of the work, be it products or services, on time.
To find such a vendor is of course another task. Most of the project heads we
interacted with were stretched between these two extremes as far as vendor
management goes. This brings us to the end of this section. In the pages to
follow, we've analyzed the IT implementations in more detail.
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