In: Operations Management
Choose an organization that you are familiar with and determine what is done to initiate information systems projects. Who is responsible for initiating projects? Is this process formal or informal? Does this appear to be a top- down or bottom-up process? How could this process be improved?
I am choosing the organization (X) I work for currently. In our organization, many projects are initiated to improve the productivity of the resources by using various Information systems. The concerned person responsible for initiating the projects is the Central IT department head. The requests for certain projects are sent in thru various teams such as Marketing, HR, IT and Customer support teams. The projects are prioritized as per the budget available in the organization, overall benefits and internal meeting & voting between the senior management including the IT head.
As described above, the process is a formal bottom-up process, wherein each team sends in the project requests or information systems they feel are necessary to improve their productivity or service the customer better. The team-specific projects involve the team heads in the evaluation of information systems that can benefit the team most. For example - Sales team's inputs were taken in the evaluation of CRM system. We had the option to implement SalesForce, Trace , ZOHO etc and on recommendation, by sales team Salesforce was chosen for implementation.
There are certain organization-wide projects i.e. across teams which follow top-down approach and are commissioned formally by the IT head in discussion with senior management. For example - Recently, we changed our legacy appraisal management system to SAP system. The decision to move away was taken by the senior management to enhance the appraisal process. IT head was involved in the evaluation of various systems such as PeopleSoft and SAP, finally, a decision was taken to move to SAP system and the project was initiated by the IT head.
This process could be improved further if we have an idea of the budget with the organization every quarter. Further, projects in the pipeline should be published. All the teams can prioritize their projects internally before presenting to the management and IT head. This way small projects that require less money but produce a lot of savings can be prioritized by teams before presenting to the management. The small projects that produce savings can be utilized to fund future projects in the pipeline.