Mary Finlay remembers well the hectic days when her IT department was all but buried by special projects for internal customers. Business people would stop IT managers in the halls asking for favors like a system enhancement or a new module for an existing application. At one point, Finlay and her colleagues counted the number of ways in which the requests would come in. “We stopped at 100,” says Finlay, deputy CIO at Partners HealthCare System Inc. in Boston. “You can literally get into a situation where you’re using most of your resources responding to those kinds of requests.”
The department didn’t have a tool to track the projects that came in over the transom, so it didn’t know how many were under way. Without a clear picture of the number of tasks on the docket, IT managers couldn’t be sure how the extra workload was affecting scheduled work. “What happened was that one day at a time, projects would get delayed,” says Finlay. “We were marginalizing resources by spreading them across the special requests plus the major initiatives.”
Read more at:
http://www.computerworld.com/managementtopics/management/project/story/0,10801,106508,00.html