Project Management - Effectiveness and Efficiency

Whether it is investments in information systems or some other capital expenditure project, the main objectives under any project management process may be summarized under two headings: Effectiveness and Efficiency.

Effectiveness is ensuring that the project (system) has the following:

§ Meets the requirements or the objectives that have been set.

§ Produced with adherence to specified quality standards to satisfy the end users.

§ Can be integrated within existing organizational information systems, structures and processes.

§ Flexible enough to respond to changes in the environment in which the new system will operate, or flexible enough to the changing requirements of the end users. Take note that changes in user’s requirements can come out during the development process itself.

§ Provides appropriate support to decision-makers at all levels: operational, tactical, and strategic.

Efficiency is ensuring that the system development project – including development, delivery, installation, and final implementation has the following:

§ Undertaken within the human resources, budgeted costs and time constraints specified at the start of the project.

§ Efficiently used the resources of the project team’s and user’s time as fully as possible so that no time was wasted on delays or time wasted on the undertaking of tasks which are not necessary or tasks which are out of the scope of the project.

§ Effective in the integration of the activities of those within the project team, and also those interactions and dependencies with other parties who are not members of the project team itself and they include the users, suppliers, consultants or managers.

§ Capable of delivering the resources such as hardware, software, services, and training on time – neither too late nor too early to cause problems of storage, loss of value due to deterioration, unexpected fluctuations in planned cash flows or loss of benefits from training due to excessive time required for the user.

In practice, the project management process may involved the management of either a small team of 1 or 2 internal systems staff, to cover all aspects of the systems development, or at the other extreme, a large group of both internal and external staff, many of whom will be specialists in limited features of the system during its development.