A Corporate Intranet Project Priority Portfolio - Essay Example

?Prioritizing the IT Project Portfolio Introduction Every project portfolio requires an outstanding management concentration to quarantee an effective comliance organizations strategic vision. Karukus (2012), quoted “portfolio management approach attempts to take the politics out of investment decisions by taking a bird's-eye view” apparently gave an insight of what most organizations believe about a project. The top management uses the bird’s-eye dimension to focus on the projec that will bring a significant outcome to the company. The prioritization of a project in a portfolio in a continous task that might alter the initial project aproval. The priorities of a project changes as per the direction taken by the organization. As such, re-evaluation is recommended. In addition to the external cutting edge technologies, the top management peruses a variety of processes to access the most appropriate project to be funded. For example, a company with well establihsed information technology infrustructure can consider building a facility from scratch or develop a unique product. The implementation and installation of support product willdefinately be outsourced. The decision to settle on such a project can be seen to be simple. However, there are other factors such as the management of project execution via costs, resources, milestones and schedules which must be in-check to ensure the success of the project. The management also faces the challenges related to supply chain oversight to make sure that materials, resources and equipments are availed on time whenever needed. The major concern is, "will the organization’s top management be able to integrate the project management processes with their portfolio to attain both business value and project profitability?” A corporate intranet project priority portfolio Background Most organizations depend on the chief information officers to process the collected data and present it in a form that can be understood. They are also expected to spearhead innovation that solves the challenges faced by the organization. The chief information officers in turn, respond by suggesting a corporate intranet. This is a platform that ensures the organization’s prized assets are safeguarded, improve process work flow and link the employees (Sauter, 2010) Critical analysis of the exising literature and continous studies by Baum (2011) revelaed that the assumption that both business objective and employees requirements can be met in one-size-fits-all project is not realistic. The management always thinks that the project idea is noble. A single univeral project that provides a blueprint of the organization is enough. Sincerely speaking, this is imposible. The context of the chosen project can have relevant content for majority of employees but not all. The users are forced to mentally filter the project non functiona contents (Power, 2008). Some CEO creates a communication platform that is one-way. Ideally, it excludes the users’ efforts to approving and publishing their content. People are gravitated away from the project because of such restrictions. When developing a project, developers ignore the feedbacks from the users. The corporate project deployment process is always delayed untill all the requirments for various departmenrts are captured. This does not work very well. Doing an IT project in a modular or in phases does not imply that the business is not big enough. It enables one to integrate all the user functional and non functional requirments. The users are more comfortable when the responsibility of managing their user account and login credentials is left in their hands. The idea of forcing the users to login to the intranet is not well taken by the users. This is bacause they already have too much login credentails such as ticketin g tracking, ERP system login credentails and the organization’s CRM (Marven, 2010). The idea of login in is viewed by the IT department as a way of enhancing security but the users have an impression that the intranet is not part of the organization’s infrustructure. Most chief information officer downplay the importance of integration. They view it as a barrier to their efforts that they apply in trying to improve the organization’s business process. They forget that ease of integration is a key factor for intranet product evalation (Marven, 2010). They believe that SOA or web services can simply be included. The chief information officers overlook the values of workflows. The consider business process intelligence as the key factor that drives the change, reducce cost, accellerate processes and inprove productivity. Most organization’s IT departments want to migrate from paper-based task to online operations. In the process, they just pick any intranet product without considering its implication on the users. The IT department also downplays the role and importance state of the art technologies such as Web 2.0 tools in ensuring user satisfaction of an IT project. Previously, companies belief that social networking network has less significance to the busines process intelligence. They think that the social medai risk the security of the organization’s information. Currently, they have realized its positive impacts and now they have moves in with a lot of expectation (Kalla, 2011). Conclusion After critically analyzing factors affecting the project portfolio, it is evident that there are substantial diverging factors between the IT management, the stakeholders and the corporate executive management. For an organization to fully utilize the benefits of an IT project, various factors that affect project portfolio management should be considered. For instance, the chief information officer should consider the users or the management should consider the ease of an employee performing a task using the system as opposed to how much profit will the system bring in. The executive management must stop forcing the there priorities at the expense of other factors rellating to IT project. This is achieved by involving the all the stakeholders and participants in the project. People should be asked for feedback and suggestions to lavarage and improve the corporate IT project (Baum, 2001). Soliciting the customer satisfaction create an impression that the intranetr project is a continuous process, and that the organization has dedicated its effort to inprove it continously. In addition, the users will be kept engaged and hence quarantee long term success and foster continous improvement. An IT project can be started as a small project, which is simple and able to demostrate the benefits of the tool and at the same time create impulsive impact on the users. The most appropropriate way of achieving this is selecting a corporate linking task since both the IT and the user community needs to share information. High usage groups should be continously involved (Auyeung & Sands, 2012). The corporate intranet should be a link between the audience and the users in regards to braod assortment of system and tools used on daily basis. It is tightly important to integrate the intranet system with the strategies of the company. The qualities of the intranet should not be compromised bacuse easier managing of applications is achieved vai the intranets ability to integrate data. References Auyeung, P., & Sands, J. (2012). The urban legend of corporate intranets. IT journal , 6 (11), 13-23. Baum, T. (2001). An investigation of user satisfaction: The case of hotels in hong kong intranet. Tourism Management , 22 (2), 157-65. Deci, E. L. (2010). Updating your company's intranet. New York: Plenum. Kalla, F. (2011). Corporate intranet - Exa web solutions. General Books LLC. Marven, S. (2010). An evaluation of user acceptance of a corporate. European conference on information systems , 55. Read More