Integration Project Management

Sunday Business Post - September 06

Integrating new and existing IT systems and platforms within an organisation can prove problematic if organisations do not accurately define objectives and metrics in advance. This is most famously seen in the reported €150 million PPARS and €40 million Pulse controversies which have hit the Irish Health Service and Garda Síochana respectively, in recent years. These costly and embarrassing debacles show what can happen when an integration project is not conceived and managed correctly.

“Clearly some high profile government projects in the last twelve to eighteen months have got bad press because they have evolved over a period of time,” said Gary Cobain, Head of Major Deals at BT Ireland. “They didn’t clearly define at the outset what it was that they wanted to achieve. The issues there have been definition at the outset and agreement across key stakeholders about what it is they are trying to deliver.”

Cobain maintains that in order to manage an integration project successfully, everyone involved in the project must come together initially and agree on objectives and aims, which can then be returned to periodically to ensure the project is on-track.

“You must design properly at the outset what the key deliverables are and then build a timeframe and a budget around that. As the project evolves we have milestones that we can look at, and at the end then we can test and sign off with the customer that we have actually delivered on those key business objectives,” said Cobain.

This project management ethos holds true whatever you are trying to achieve in an integration project, whether it is lowering costs, raising productivity, improving business practices within an organisation, increasing customer satisfaction or any other performance metric.

A successful integration project will reverberate at all levels within an organisation. Declan Sheehan, Commercial Director with Oracle Consulting, argues that all stakeholders within an organisation should have input into the planning of a successful integration project.

“The whole thing about integration is that there are many factors involved,” said Sheehan. “You may find you have to link systems and work across numerous functions within an organisation. So when you integrate the systems you have to set up the right governance structure in the organisation so that everyone involved – people from finance, HR, payroll etc – has a say in how the project is run, because at the end of the day everybody is impacted by this integration project.”

Sheehan suggests that a formal structure is put in place to oversee the progress of the integration project.

“We recommend that some kind of steering committee is set up with all the stakeholders sitting on it. We agree how we actually run the project at that level, how we track changes in scope, time, cost and make sure we don’t have significant increases within the project to ensure all stakeholders are happy with the outcome,” he said.

“This committee would generally be chaired by an overall sponsor of the project, a person who actually has governing say as to how things are conducted, in a sense a veto. That sponsor generally holds the purse-strings on the project,” said Sheehan.

Paul Allen, IT Projects Lead at BearingPoint Ireland, says that the requirements for successful integration projects must come from business, rather than IT, imperatives.

“Typically for a project you put together a business case. Essentially the benefits should outweigh the costs. We work not only very closely with the IT department, but also with their business as well. Integration projects are business driven, not IT driven. The business has a need, and IT is an enabler or facilitator of delivering on that,” said Allen.

Allen holds that as technologies and business processes are evolving so rapidly, and as Irish businesses look to become more flexible and adapt quickly to changes in their markets, effectively integrating platforms and systems within an organisation holds the key to business success.

“Companies need to move away from fragmented systems, they need to become much more agile in terms of what they offer and how they operate so that technological agility and operational agility don’t become an inhibitor of an organisations ability to deliver new services to the market in a timely fashion and in a flexible way,” said Allen.

One outstanding trend within the integration market is that solutions are becoming increasingly designed with non-IT professionals in mind as users. The popularity and importance of GUI (Graphical User Interface) Web-services bears this out. One example is BPEL – Business Process Execution Language - which co-ordinates the flow of data between applications according to easy-to-define business processes.

“We are moving towards easier to use tools, which are more business focused and process focused which allow you to define the integration more quickly,” said Sheehan. “The interface is also being operated now by more business people and less technical people.”