Managing software developing projects

Master's Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 1, University of Salzburg (Universitätslehrgang Executive Master in Management ¿ MIM), language: English, abstract: In the last decades Information Technology (IT) has become vital for every company. And, a company not using IT would be unimaginable today. Primarily, IT was merely used for accelerating existent processes. Mostly standardised applications have been deployed to standard areas in companies (for example accounting software). Today, IT is an important part for modelling all types of business processes, not only the standardised processes. Furthermore, to gain competitive advantages, mere standard software is not suitable anymore. This is because standard software can not support the requirements of individualised processes, necessary for doing business better than the competitor. Therefore, either standard software is customised for supporting individualised processes or a company decides developing individualised software from the scratch.

Often companies decide to develop individualised software on their own because of the following three reasons: First, the process knowledge is important for gaining competitive advantages and this confidential information must kept inside the company. Second, employees within the organisation have the best process knowledge. Effective transfer of process knowledge to the IT-department can be guaranteed. Third, customising standard software needs much external expertise which is in general expensive.

Often, software development projects have budgets of several million Euros and can cause an even higher reduction of costs. Thus, process and software development has become one of the most important aspects for many IT-departments in today¿s companies.

However, managing software developing projects is not an easy task. Many software developing projects are not on time and budget. An analysis of the Standish Group shows that only 26% of all software projects are completed on time and on budget and can provide the predefined functions. On the other hand, excellent developers with sophisticated approaches can increase productivity by ten to twenty times. (cf. Moll 2004) Consequently, the potential of cost reduction is very high. In future, companies have to deploy new information systems more effectively than today. Otherwise companies can not sustain competitive in faster changing markets.