As part of the Bachelor course "project management" we will have a guest lecture by Prof. Robert Winter, University of St. Gallen. The guest lecture is open also to interested Master students:
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Title:
Large IT Projects - Three Failure Patterns and Suggestions for Improving Project Governance
Venue: 24.04.2018, 14:15-15:45 in lecture hall Leo 1
Abstract:
For decades much effort has been made to improve project management techniques and capabilities. Although project management has matured significantly, the failure rate of large projects remains high – and this applies also to large IT projects. Our postmortem analysis of 15 large, complex IT projects of the Swiss federal administration with an encountered cumulative loss of approximately one billion Swiss Francs shows that, while project management deficits account for some challenges, the causes for project failure primarily lie in inadequate governance capabilities of project steering committees and project sponsors. Based on insights gained from the initial failure analysis, the Swiss federal government decided to assess all its ongoing large IT projects based on our co-designed analysis framework. In the meantime also several private companies have assessed IT projects applying our framework. A (small) number of large IT projects has been stopped as a consequence. For other projects, valuable discussions or measures have been initiated. The data gained by these over 100 assessments will allow to identify patterns that promise to be a reference for what information to ask for, when to intervene and how to intervene.
Short bio:
Robert Winter is full Professor of Business & Information Systems Engineering at the University of St. Gallen (HSG) and Director of HSG's Institute of Information Management. He was founding Academic Director of HSG's Executive Master of Business Engineering programme and Academic Director of HSG's Ph.D. in Management programme. He received Master degrees in business administration and business education as well as a doctorate in social sciences from Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany. After eleven years as a researcher and deputy chair in information systems in Germany, he joined HSG in 1996. Being a current member of the editorial board of "MIS Quarterly Executive" and other IS journals, he also served as vice Editor-in-chief of "Business & Information Systems Engineering" and Senior Associate Editor of "European Journal of Information Systems". His research interests include design science research methodology, enterprise architecture management and the governance of large IT projects/programmes.
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