IT Project Governance in Project Delivery: Key Processes, Activities, Roles and Responsibilities

TL;DR

This paper develops IT project governance frameworks emphasizing processes, roles, and responsibilities to address governance issues that often lead to project failures, based on expert input and literature review.

Contribution

It introduces comprehensive IT governance frameworks that integrate key processes, activities, and stakeholder roles to improve project success rates.

Findings

Governance issues are a major cause of IT project failures.

The frameworks incorporate stakeholder roles, milestones, and approval processes.

Expert insights and literature inform the framework development.

Abstract

The general objective of this work was to contribute to the general body of knowledge and research work in the area of managing IT projects successfully. The office of Government commerce of the UK Government in conjunction with the National Audit came out with a guideline in 2007 which list out eight causes of project failures. Six out of the eight causes were attributed to governance issues (Aon, 2011). This shows clearly that governance activities in project management are really important, and failure to place premium on them can result in failure of projects. The research work was therefore intended to come out with IT governance frameworks that can help resolve the problem of failure of IT projects resulting from governance issues. Four IT program managers and eight IT project managers were talked to on a variety of IT project governance issues. The frameworks were developed based on a combination of literature, experts (IT project and program managers of the telecom industry in Ghana) input, observation, and so on. The governance frameworks depicts project management processes, project activities, project governance activities, roles and responsibilities of key stakeholders, key milestones, approval bodies, signatures, and so on, to ensure successful delivery of IT projects.