Comparison of Project Management in IT Service versus Product Development
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The document compares IT project management in IT service delivery versus product development. In IT service delivery, projects focus on clearly defining the service, customers, delivery parameters, and benchmarks to ensure service level agreements are met. In contrast, IT product development requires understanding target customers, selecting development lifecycles, defining the product utilization and lifecycle, and creating supporting ecosystems to provide a complete user experience. While both require defining requirements, IT service delivery emphasizes consistent delivery while product development focuses on building usable, reliable, and valuable products within an ecosystem.
Comparison of Project Management in IT Service versus Product Development
- 1. Comparison and Contrast of IT Project Management in IT Service industry versus the IT product development industry Hi fellow managers, today, I would like to write on the often discussed topic of the approach to IT Project Management in the IT Service delivery versus IT Product development industry. General (and rather inaccurate) inscriptions/presumptions center around the IT Service delivery being less demanding as IT product industry to a 'different work culture and ethos'. These might all be partly correct but they are definitely analogous to the tale of 6 blindfolded men describing an elephant. Let us take a sequential and gradual approach to examine each of these industries and the management style. In certain large IT organizations, one might find both of these as separate departments within the same company (like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM etc): a. IT Service delivery/industry: The main factors and cornerstones of IT service delivery within medium (1000 employee) to large (5,000+) organizations are as follows: - Definition of Service: What is the IT service being offered? Is it coding support, fresh application construction, maintenance, production support, database maintenance, automation of programs etc? - Definition of Customer: Who is the customer to whom the service is being offered? Is he the end-customer to consume the information or is he going to process the information and send it to another entity or company later? - Definition of Service Parameters: How will the service be delivered - remotely, automatically (via automated software/cloud), virtualized and the nature of service (continual, annual, monthly, on-demand) etc. - Nature of the Customer: Is it an internal customer (another dept.) or external (a supplier/end-customer/vendor/individual)? These all need to be defined. - Benchmarking of the Service: What are the benchmarks to ensure that the service is meeting the agreed upon SLAs or parameters and passing on the benefits or value to the end-user? Who will sign off on the service delivery and/or deliverables etc? As you see above, in an IT service-oriented internal/external organization, it is necessary for the IT project and program management to define things clearly, turn abstract information into well-defined bodies of information and approach things gradually instead of hastening to ensure proper service delivery and the appreciation of benefits by its end-customer b. IT product development industry: Contraventionally, the main factors and cornerstones for IT product development are vastly different as we can see here:
- 2. - Definition of Target Customer Base: For any product to be developed, it is extremely important for the product team to understand the Target Customer Base - who is the customer, what kind of product are they building, how will it be utilized by end- customer, what is the business problem that the product will address? This all information is necessary to be part of the 'Requirement gathering and Requirement definition process' while building the said product. - Definition of Team structure and SDLC selection: Once the requirements have been made granular, the product team needs to define a Team structure and assess and select an SDLC for the product. This could be either Iterative, Waterfall/Cascade or Agile type of SDLC. Each of the SDLC type is suited to individual types of products and their lifecycle. For example, Waterfall has been found to be more effective when requirements are clearly written and frozen and teams well defined. On the other hand, Iterative SDLC is good for small-sized products requiring frequent builds and shorter lifecycles. Agile, the newest kid on the block, is good for small-medium sized projects with high energy teams where team structure and requirements are not well defined and business wants to get something out the door at regular intervals. - Utilization of the Product and its Lifecycle: Who will utilize the product, how, in what configuration and operating system, how many users will be using it? What will be the overall lifecycle of the product, how much warranty, what will happen after the lifecycle of the product expires? Will there be a new version or will the same product be improvised upon? These questions need to be answered, atleast thought upon while the product is being built. - General Management Structure in the Product Organization: The product team needs to add a management structure above their organization to be able to deliver and sell the product as well as interact with the end-customer on the product. - Servicing the product: Who will service the product - internally trained users, a customer help desk, an outside organization, or clients creating their own team to supporting the product's users? This also requires creating support blocks for the Product support team (SLA agreements, Maintenance and Downtime windows, on-call teams. production Level 1 and 2 support, issue resolution structure etc) - Creating an Ecosystem: In the world of ecosystems, no single product can survive the test of time without a solid IT ecosystem and supporting applications like Help Manuals, White Papers, User Forums, Product Wiki and other integrated, interacting applications to provide the user a complete ecosystem to work in, not just a standalone product by itself. Examples are MS office, MS access and SQL server, Oracle suite of DB products, IBM's Rational suite of products, LAMP Stack in open source apps etc So, as you can see, the IT Product Development Organization necessitates a completely different approach for the IT Management to 'define, envision and structurize' intangible information like requirements, user experiences, business rules, artifacts and user wants into a 'Usable, Reliable and Valuable IT product' which not only solves the immediate
- 3. business issue but also provides interconnectivity to related applications and creates an ecosystem so that the user can work in the IT ecosystem for a complete user experience and increased organizational productivity and output.