 |
 |
 |
|
01.12.10 Why Is IT Maintenance Lacking Over IT Projects?  By Charles BetzIn the quest for IT value, a commonly cited figure is that projects (new functionality) consume a mere 25% or so of IT spending, while "maintenance" consumes the balance. This is argued by many (including me, in the 1st edition of my book) to be a Bad Thing. Some well known authors even propose that reducing maintenance & increasing projects should be measured as evidence of IT value delivery - i.e., a Key Performance Indicator. Today, I started to wonder if this whole point of view might be misguided. I am searching for generally applicable principles for IT management, and "project vs. maintenance %" as a KPI seems a little too context-dependent for my comfort: • Organizations have differing approaches to funding work. "Project" and "maintenance" are simply different funding buckets, and do not in and of themselves determine the degree to which work is innovative or value add. For example, projects can fund routine compliance initiatives, required but not truly value-add in a Lean sense, while cutting edge work may be performed by senior staff funded through ongoing operational budgets. Take the deployment of a major new framework (ERP or similar platform). Getting the basic foundation and first couple of modules in may comprise the high-visibility "project." But after that, important development may be covered under the guise of "maintenance" - this is again a question of the organization's funding model. Or the areas of business intelligence and reporting, in which the core platform may be established via a project, but value is often delivered by the efforts of full time analysts who spend years deepening their familiarity with the data and its opportunities. • The assumption is that the maintenance work is mundane: performance tuning, re-indexing data sets, break-fix, and so forth. But this assumption is largely incorrect in many of the environments I am familiar with. A good bit of actual development and implementation may also take place, depending on the organization's approach to demand management. Demand management professionals may well argue that distinguishing value add, creative, implementation work from the truly mundane is essential for investment transparency. Project management professionals may argue that project methodology is essential to mitigate risk. But there are two major obstacles to this: first, the business sponsor may have been savvy enough to negotiate a defined headcount of "maintenance" staff who are not fungible. Why would they do this? Because if they accept that all project resources are fungible and must compete greenfield with the fair haired poster child project of the week, they may lose the ability to continuously improve their service. The second obstacle is that even if incremental funding is assured for that application, too many PMOs have compliance-heavy processes that are rightly perceived as non-value-add, especially if everyone agrees that the system's architecture is sound and the #1 priority is to iteratively improve the functionality over the course of some period of time. (See: Agile vs. Waterfall.) The concept of project to my mind adds value when the need is to choreograph resources (especially consultants, contractors and assets) and manage for critical path. Continue reading this article. About the Author: Charles Betz is a Senior Enterprise Architect, and chief architect for IT Service Management strategy for a US-based Fortune 50 enterprise. He is author of the forthcoming Architecture and Patterns for IT Service Management, Resource Planning, and Governance: Making Shoes for the Cobbler's Children (Morgan Kaufman/Elsevier, 2006, ISBN 0123705932). He is the sole author of the popular www.erp4it.com weblog. |
||||||||
|
| ||
|
-- ITProNews is an iEntry,
Inc. publication -- iEntry, Inc. 2549 Richmond Rd. Lexington KY, 40509 ©2010 iEntry, Inc. All Rights Reserved Privacy Policy Legal archives | advertising info | news headlines | free newsletters | comments/feedback | submit article |
