August Issue of the Taos Newsletter: Project Management

Message from Taos CEO and Co-Founder, Ric Urrutia, and Co-Founder, Alexis Tatarsky

Users generally think of IT as a collection of services about which they have definite opinions: the helpdesk is helpful, or it isn't. The systems are slow, or they're responsive. Their favorite peripheral is supported, or it isn't. Policies are reasonable, or they are burdensome.

CIO's and IT Directors, on the other hand, tend to view IT as a collection of forward-looking Projects to enhance the user experience, meet business objectives, and increase ROI. Performance as an IT executive means both delivering on a range of services, and managing a portfolio of projects. In this issue of IT Intelligence we focus on the issues and opportunities inherent in IT Project Management.

The past few years have seen significantly more care paid to how IT investments are made and what their payback will be than was the case during the boom. For Taos that has meant that we're increasingly called upon to help improve the management of specific IT projects, and to help institute practical approaches to effective IT Project Management for our clients. We're excited about this because we feel that many organizations could realize tremendous benefits from relatively small changes in the way they go about defining, scoping, funding, and implementing IT projects.

In this issue, we are delighted to share an interview we conducted with our client Marti Menacho, the CIO of TIBCO Software. Ms. Menacho has a tremendous variety of experience as an IT and business leader at companies such as Nortel, Clarify, and SGI, and has served on committees such as former Vice President Al Gore's eGovernment initiative. In her conversation with Taos, Ms. Menacho brings up many interesting points about the practical improvements a company can make -- from instituting some rigor by requiring project sponsors to articulate how their projects relate to larger objectives, to shifting the locus of conversation with the user community away from what IT does, and onto what the users are trying to accomplish in their own jobs. She discusses the usefulness of an IT roadmap in getting buy-in to prioritization of limited resources, as well as how to implement project management disciplines when one doesn't have a fully developed PMO (Project Management Office) and project managers are IT professionals without formal project management training.

Also in this issue, Taos's own Samantha Leach shares some of our experiences helping clients make their projects more successful, some of the thinking behind our pragmatic real-world approach, and some interesting tidbits from sources like the META Group and the Standish Group on how IT projects often run into difficulty.

Ric Urrutia

CEO & Co-Founder

Alexis Tatarsky

Co-Founder

Taos

"delivering excellence in IT”