A01 chaf6542 06 se fm indd

4 

Proper planning (9.6%)

5 

Realistic expectations (8.2%)

You can see that a focus on user requirements and senior management support are common 

to many of these factors.

It follows that the project governance of digital business projects, like that of other major 

information systems, is essential to success. The COBIT framework provides a good sum‑

mary of the requirements from a governance approach. COBIT is the widely adopted IT 

governance model for Control Objectives for Information and related Technology. This 

definition is also helpful since it highlights some of the success factors in project manage‑

ment which we will cover later in this chapter. Project management is one of the key pro‑

cesses COBIT identifies for the effective governance of IT. It defines its control objective 

PO10 (COBIT, 2001) as follows.

Managing projects should satisfy the business requirement:

to set priorities and to deliver on time and within budget

and be enabled by

the organisation identifying and prioritising projects in line with the operational plan and 

the adoption and application of sound project management techniques for each project 

undertaken and takes into consideration:

● 

business management sponsorship for projects

● 

program management

● 

project management capabilities

● 

user involvement

● 

task breakdown, milestone definition and phase approvals

● 

allocation of responsibilities

● 

rigorous tracking of milestones and deliverables

● 

cost and manpower budgets, balancing internal and external resources

● 

quality assurance plans and methods

● 

program and project risk assessments

● 

transition from development to operations.

For effective project management the following elements need to be incorporated as 

part of the project management process as described, for example, by Chaffey and Wood 

(2005):

● 

Estimation – identifying the activities involved in the project, sometimes referred to as 

a ‘work breakdown structure’ (WBS). The sequence of activities for implementation of a 

typical digital business system is shown in Figure 10.6.

M10_CHAF6542_06_SE_C10.indd   485

7/22/14   1:28 AM

---

486

Part 3  Implementation

● 

Resource allocation – after the initial WBS, appropriate resources can be allocated to the 

tasks.

● 

Schedule/plan – after resource allocation, the amount of time for each task can be deter‑

mined according to the availability and skills of the people assigned to the tasks. Effort 

time is the total amount of work that needs to occur to complete a task. Elapsed time 

indicates how long in time (such as calendar days) the task will take, and is dependent on 

the number of people working on the task, and their skills.

● 

Monitoring and control – monitoring involves ensuring the project is working to plan once 

it has started. Control is taking corrective action if the project deviates from the plan. In 

particular the project manager will want to hit