The process of selecting what IT projects an organization undertakes is a combination of balancing strategic needs with operational imperatives and opportunities for radical improvements in service levels and cost efficiencies.
Enterprise technology projects that span across the organization and represent mission critical systems are the level of project that requires an IT project manager. As such in this milestone, students need to identify a project that that will be their focus for Milestone Two (Project Charter), Milestone Three (MS Project Baseline Plan), and the Final Submission (MS Project Plan Completed and Project Communications).
Select an enterprise system to be implemented in an organization that you are familiar with, or for those unfamiliar with enterprise level IT projects you may select from one of the following three examples:
1. Migrate an organization's enterprise email system to MS Exchange and integrate it with their MS SharePoint file sharing collaboration system.
2. Implement an online workflow system for use by all departments in the organization to enable routing and approval of controls to replace existing paper based systems, such as expense reporting, vacation requests, new hire approvals, etc.
3. Develop an intranet portal to provide single sign-on (SSO) for an organization's employees to access existing systems including Accounting, Human Resources, email, and Customer Relationship Management.
If selecting your own enterprise system, the system you select must be considered mission critical, and assume widespread use across the organization's staff, stakeholders, or customers. The system you select should have a web user interface and integrate with existing systems.
The system you select will need to provide reports and enable process owner's direct access to their data using Business Intelligence tools. The system you select must provide different levels of access privileges based on user functions, and be protected against malware and unauthorized access. The environment can be on-premises, on-cloud, or mixed. The project should be sized not to exceed 1 year from initiation to rollout, or otherwise defined in phases not exceeding one year.
Specifically the following critical elements must be addressed:
The selected project must exhibit the follow attributes:
- Mission Critical IT Solution
- Impact Across Organization
- Multiple Technical Skills in Project Team
- Web Interface
- Users and System Functions
- Technology Environment