Educause '09: IT Governance

My next session was on IT governance, though it would be more accurate to describe it as being about project governance. That said, there were some striking differences between the way the speaker’s institution operates, and what happens at Warwick:-

Firstly, there is a committee for selecting and prioritising projects. Kind of like our own IPSC, I guess, but with the striking difference that this committee allocates resources directly; it has about a million and a half discretionary dollars to spend, and somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000 person hours annually. What this means, clearly, is that putting a proposal to, and getting the approval of, this committee is actually a real mechanism – indeed, the only mechanism – for getting a project resourced and underway.

This contrasts with our own somewhat fragmented situation, where committee approval, funding allocation and project management all happen in different places, and it’s quite striking how logical it seems, when presented by someone who’s doing it, that these things all need to happen in the same place.

The other point that’s interesting is that the speaker’s institution approved and delivered of the order of a hundred or so projects per year. In order to accomplish this, they had to ensure that their approval, management and review processes were as efficient as possible. If each project requires extensive documentation, frequent meetings, the participation of lots of people, then the number of projects you can do is limited. So there’s a relentless focus on reviewing, streamlining and improving the process, and ensuring that nobody who wants to commission a project, or who is working on delivering a service, feels that the resources they have to devote to project management are disproportionate relative to the resources devoted to the deliverables of the project.

John Dale : 04 Nov 2009 18:46 |  Tags: Educause09 |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem