Effective IT Project Management: Using Teams to Get Projects Completed on Time and Under Budget

The team now presents the General Availability review to executive staff (see Figure 7.1).

Figure 7.1: General Availability Presentation

Page 1: Cover Page. This document should be for controlled distribution and list the names of all the people attending and receiving the review handout. The cover page should list the project name , the phase, and the date.

Page 2: Agenda. List major items, the team members who will be presenting, and the time allotted for presentations. Agenda items for a Phase 7 review may include an introduction, actual costs, user acceptance, and summary.

Page 3: Phase 7 Yearly Review. Review the items that have been created or completed over the past year:

• User acceptance

• Outstanding bugs

• Future development

• Maintenance record

• Available training

• Help Desk availability ”for example, the number of people trained on the application, the number of user questions on this project, and the speed of answering user questions.

Page 4: User Acceptance and Status.

Page 5: Financial Summary. List actual cost to sustain.

Page 6: Executive Session. Executive sign-off, executives note any action items and decide if this project should continue or be discontinued.

7.4 in a Nutshell

The project team should present the project s status to executive staff on a yearly basis.

• IT needs to present the current bug count and review what the sustaining IT costs are for the project. These costs may include additional programming, the project s share of hardware resources, and IT personnel.

• Help Desk reviews the project s costs and effectiveness.

• Business Development discusses the effectiveness of the program.

• Training needs to present training costs and effectiveness.

• The past phase review information is compared to the actual costs of maintaining the project.

• Executive staff reviews this information and decides if the project should be funded for another year or if the project should be taken off the market and an End of Life (EOL) review presented.