PREFACE

This book is designed to give a practical introduction to IT project management principles and techniques. The first edition was intended more specifically to support candidates for the BCS Foundation Certificate in IS Project Management This edition still supports this qualification, but updates some of the material and broadens its practical application.

Taking this qualification is not itself a daunting challenge: it consists of an hour-long 40-question multiple choice examination. However, the intention was never just to help cram for an examination. While there might be an immediate concern to pass a test, for most people the more important motivation was to gain guidance on planning and managing an IT project. The text was designed to help those from an IT practitioner background who were beginning to take on project management responsibilities. However, it is not just IT developers who have to grapple with IT projects: users often have to bear the brunt of IT-driven business change and have their own project responsibilities that can have a decisive impact on project success. An additional aim was to give these IT users some insights into IT project management issues. The text therefore goes beyond simply helping people to tick the right boxes in a test and aspires to support novice IT project leaders in their place of work.

When learning about any new topic, a good starting point is a text which provides a simple explanation of the basics. This can provide a foundation that allows you to go on and grasp more advanced concepts. A measure of the success of the first edition was that it started to be used for purposes for which it was not primarily designed. The text started to appear in the reading lists of courses where the overall syllabus was broader and the assessment more demanding than the foundation certificate. One example of this was the BCS Higher Education Qualification Diploma in Project Management (an ‘academic’ BCS qualification comparable to a UK university award and taken mainly by overseas candidates). Some of the changes for the second edition have been made in response to this unexpected use. The focus still remains on the foundations but care has been taken to provide links to other, more detailed project management material. Wherever possible, alternatives to the terminology we have used are provided for techniques and concepts to allow easier cross-reference to other bodies of knowledge. For example, ‘steering committee’, ‘project board’ and ‘project management board’ all refer to largely the same concept in project management.

We have put in links to further material using a symbol for those who want to explore a topic more deeply. Some material in the basic text goes beyond what is needed for the BCS foundation syllabus and these have been marked with a symbol to indicate an ‘advanced topic’.

It may be heretical to say this in a project management text, but successful projects do not depend only on good project management and some of the links provided are to material on complementary disciplines that can assist positive project outcomes. (The BCS Diploma in Business Analysis to which the Foundation Certificate in IS Project Management can contribute supports this view.)

The BCS Foundation Diploma syllabus has been very stable in recent years and there have been no massive changes in content in the new edition. Some inadvertent gaps have been filled: for example, more has been added on the question of deciding whether to build or buy an IT solution. A suggestion to acknowledge the growing interest in agile approaches has been incorporated. The main principles of project agility – such as the focus on iterations and increments in project delivery – had been well-established before the term ‘agile’ was adopted in the context of software development, so it has been easy to signpost those elements of our approach that dealt with them. It was also suggested that more quantitative approaches to risk assessment be discussed, and this has been done.

The BCS Foundation Certificate course’s focus is different from that of PRINCE2. PRINCE2 is a UK government-sponsored set of procedures for managing major projects. In our view, it effectively describes an information system for a project that allows it to be run in a controlled and efficient manner. Although PRINCE2 is really an administrative standard that will tell you what decisions need to be taken, when they need to be taken and by whom, it offers little guidance about how decisions are made: it does not claim to be a set of project management principles and techniques.

The BCS syllabus can also be distinguished from more general introductory courses on project management by its focus on IT projects. While the core elements of project management remain the same regardless of the type of project, there are some significant differences in emphasis with IT projects. The description of the IT-focused system development life cycle has already been mentioned, but there are other topics – like testing and the measurement of functionality to support the estimation of system size – which get more attention here than in more general project management courses.

The following people contributed the material for the text:

Norman Smith Chapters 1 and 4

Bob Hughes Chapters 2 and 6

Roger Ireland Chapters 3 and part of 8

Brian West Chapters 5 and part of 8

David I. Shepherd Chapter 7

Any defects and errors are almost certainly those of the editor, Bob Hughes. Sue McNaughton and Elaine Boyes at the BCS drove the publication project for the first edition along. The original development of the Foundation Certificate as a whole has involved many BCS staff, including Malcolm Sillars, Rebecca Stoddart, Imelda Byrne, Steve Causer and Carol Lewis. Jutta Mackwell was instrumental in the creation of this second edition. Roger Ireland has been a painstaking reviewer, and Karen Greening managed the production of the book from the author’s word-processed manuscript to the final version that appears here.

The book is dedicated, as was the last, to the memory of Jimmy Robertson.