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Technology Sabha 2008
Managing projects
K Balasubramanian, IT advisor to CAG of India & Deputy Director
General (NIC), Ministry of Communications and IT, Government of India
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Managing projects is probably the biggest challenge for e-Governance
initiatives. To tackle this issue, K Balasubramanian, IT advisor to CAG of India
& Deputy Director General (NIC), Ministry of Communications and IT, Government
of India gave his ideas on how one should go about managing a project for a
successful initiative.
He started off by stating that implementations have a loose
coupling between organizations and ICT and are fragmented due to several factors
such as environment, culture, structure, standard procedures, politics, and
management decisions. His Gap analysis in the form of plan to fail, fail to
plan, and implementation and impact issues followed. According to him, e-Governance
projects needs to be supplemented with organizational change, business process
re-engineering issues and organizational politics. He said, “Technology
gives us a solution but we need to look at managerial issues. We are not going
to have enough manpower and we need to have change management in place which
is currently not taking place.”
According to Subramanian’s key findings, a project implementation should
have a committed leadership and should follow the order of vision, mission,
implementation, impact study and finally should go through improvisation. He
added, “Project management and IT management are two different things.
While managing the project, one should see that technical specifications are
made with care and take time in the same task.”
According to him, there are several integration factors which
are missing in projects. Apart from that, wrong personal goals, failure to champion
the project, ignorance and remoteness from project teams are some of the reasons
for failure. Subramanian talked about four pillars for successful projects,
viz. process, people, technology and resources. He feels that collaborate, communicate,
cooperate, co-work and co-exist is a mantra for success. According to him, sustainability
is a key concern for projects and one need to design an implementation model
for the same. Towards the end, he defined nine rules of risk management and
said that e-Governance is an evolutionary process.
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