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What is the relationship between IT governance and project management?
The distinction is not always clear, so please help explain it.
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7 Answers
To add to Steve’s explanation, IT governance relates to establishing and enforcing standards around IT systems, policies, and procedures. Project management on the other hand focuses on individual pieces of work.
By railway analogy (given your recent Amtrack ride :-D), IT governance can be though of as the track, project management as the train locomotive, and individual projects and systems as the rail cars.
IT Governance (the track) determines the overall destination and the best route to get there. Through strategic planning, governance builds bridges across valleys, carves tunnels through mountains, and clears paths through forests to ensure that the train can pass these obstacles effortlessly.
Project management (the locomotive) determines and manages the speed (time line), number of cars/amount of payload (scope), and amount of fuel required (budget) to deliver each piece of work (project) along the track to its destination.
Without good governance, project management is difficult or impossible. However, without good project management, governance is a plan without execution.
By this same analogy, we can see how bad tracks (weak governance), excessive speed (unreasonable timelines), and unaccounted payload (scope creep) so often lead to TRAIN WRECKS (aka failed projects).
OK Mike, I’ll take another stab at it (less metaphorically this time).
It all really boils down to scope. Though project management is truly a type of governance, its scope is generally limited to specific pieces of work being executed over a specific time frame. Similarly, program management governs how a series of projects or a continuous piece of work is managed and executed. As a general rule, project and program management fall under solutions delivery while day-to-day support of applications and systems falls under service delivery.
Governance on the other hand determines how the entire enterprise works. Both solutions delivery and service delivery fall under the scope of governance. This is where and how long term, comprehensive, strategic alignment is not only planned, but also executed. At a very high level (and depending on which governance framework[s] one prefers), Governance has 4 basic components:
1- Business assessment: polling the business unit(s) and gaining a clear understanding of their objectives and strategic direction in order to determine needs and how to best meet those needs. This is a continuous process and changes here cascade through the other components.
2- Strategic and tactical planning: Designing systems and operations in such a way that they fill the business needs and enable the business to meet its objectives. Part of this activity is assessing the current state, determining the current capabilities and maturity, and determining how best to optimize.
3- Governing execution: This is where governance departs from simple strategic and/or tactical planning. This includes the implementation of process and procedures to ensure that the strategic and tactical plans are actually carried out as designed. Project management can be a huge contributor in this area.
4- Evaluation: This step looks at the work being done and measures outcomes against targets and projections to ensure progress is moving along as hoped. Through a combination of lead and lag measures adjustments to the overall strategic and tactical plans can be made as required.
In closing, project management is to individual pieces of work what governance is to the entire enterprise.
I will do my best to keep this short-and-sweet, because I could talk about this for days.
Project management is one of the mechanisms (and there are many) used to enable IT governance. Project management:
- provides data to make IT governance decisions
- is used to assist in realizing IT governance decisions
- provides data to determine if the IT governance decisions were the 'right' decisions
So often people make IT governance sound like a list of rules and regulations. There are certainly policies etc. that are the outcome of proper governance, but IT governance is so much more. To quote Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross, IT governance is meant to:
Ensure the business and IT are aligned
Ensure that IT delivers value to the business
Ensure that IT manages risk
Ensure that IT manages resources
Ensure that IT manages performance
Governance ties back the activities that IT engages in to business value and ultimate purpose. It also ties the COST of IT to a measurable business value.
Project management should provide the data, decision points, and the transparency to make sure the correct decision were/are made. Project management is a tool to achieve proper governance.
Governance can exist without project management, but effective project management can't exist without governance.
I would disagree that governance can exist without project management. Project management is an essential part of the feedback loop to ensure that the right governance decisions are made and that adjustments are made along the way if things get off track.
I'm still trying to figure out the differences between governance and project management, and the relationship between them, since it's just not clear, based on this conversation.
More details or explanations from anyone?
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