A Technocratic Investments Project Management Methodology for the Information Systems Development and Acquisition Process
The ARIADNE Methodology is a project management methodology for the development and acquisition process of information systems and technological investments. The methodology is separated into two prime sub-methodologies that can cover any type of information technology project, process and investment.
The first one, the ARIADNE-PM (Project Management), approaches completely the processes related primarily to the management of information systems acquisition projects. Organizations that can use this methodology are actually characterized as customers or clients of the organizations that develop technology. These are the ones that purchase technology or invest on a technological and technocratic corporate initiative and investment.
The second one, the ARIADNE-SE (Systems Engineering), approaches completely the processes related to the development of an information system. This methodology can be primarily used towards the management of the engineering process by organizations that develop technology for either internal or external projects or products. These organizational are considered to be the technology providers to internal (inter-departmental) or external (other organizations) customers.
The ARIADNE methodology has been developed in its current version after many years of exhaustive research and development, completely financed by EMPROSS SITC and its Managing Director Dr. Evangelos Markopoulos.
ARIADNE combines a number of innovative project management concepts and structures in a unique integration and harmony not found in no other methodology and methodological framework worldwide.
A detailed presentation of the ARIADNE methodology in concept is presented trough the following chapter-pages :
The Issue of Project Management.
The Project Management Issue in figures.
Detailed Presentation of the ARIADNE Methodology.
The Issue of Project Management:
IT projects and specifically software oriented projects are continuous, live and never-ending projects. The most significant characteristic in the implementation of such projects is the management of the implementation process. Developing or acquiring a software system is more a management technique than a technical capability. Software development is under the discipline of software engineering and like all engineering disciplines is based on structured engineering methods. Building quality software is a kind of an art, just like building a qualitative construction. Information technology systems require much more than innovation and bright ideas since their main ingredient, the software, has no tangible characteristics.
Successful project management can foresee the course of the projects not only in their technical and engineering perspective but mainly towards their functionality and operations. But the question here is on what is successful project management and how in can be obtained.
Using a project management methodology can be a good start, but unfortunately doesn’t seem to help much since despite the usage of methodologies the failures in ICT project in particular, remain huge probably for not using the methodology sincerely or at all. Project management methodologies have been blamed as time and budget consuming, theoretical and bureaucratic processes at least. This could be possible in the case that if the methodology has been selected supports the management of specific types of projects under specific restrictions, different from the characteristics of the project to be used on.
The selection of the method, one can use to perform project management can be more complex than the project itself. Having to properly identify project facets and project management dimensions in order to identify the category from which the methodology will derive is not all that needs to be done. The dimension a project can be seen and the facets the project might have form new sets of project constraints that can be categorized as management and organizational constraints of the project and to also take into consideration the organizational management capability to handle them.
The methodology selected to be used in the management of a project must take under consideration constraints related with the technology of the project, the size, the schedule, the budget, the existing technology in the organization, the experience of the contractors or the implementation team, the management teams, previous work with methodologies and structures processes, the maturity of the project owner to understand and pay for the quality and success, and many others.
To identify a methodology that can satisfy all the constraints of a project is so impossible as is to find a project with all of these constraints. Successful project management is based on a combination of engineering and managerial processes and tasks.
Nevertheless, the selection of a methodology, which can be used towards managing a project, needs not to be restricted to a single methodology. If a project has many implementation and management constraints, then more than one methodology can be used to support its management effort, but since that might sound very peculiar to most of the people, the project management frameworks have been introduced, along with the agility concept to resolve this complexity and madness.
The ARIADNE Methodology is a complete agile project management framework supporting the management effort on technologic initiatives and investments either there are through the development of information technology projects or through the acquisition of information technology projects.
The Project Management Issue in figures:
Software project management differs significantly from other project management concepts. Software is an outcome that cannot be touched, and it is difficult to describe its functionality. Most of the software projects failed because their requirements were not clear and stable throughout the development process, others due to lack of documentation, communication, contractual obligations, etc. Software is actually considered to be a brain product. It is developed within the brains of programmers and other technical staff who participate in the implementation team of a project. Managing the way software engineers think and work towards completing a software projects is quite difficult and risky. The difficulty is to manage and synchronize brilliant, in most of the cases, minds without a written, accepted and defined management and implementation process.
On the other hand the risk of having a software project being developed without proper documentation, metrics, planned activities (especially in testing and configuration), is often overseen. An error found in the requirements can cost only an extra 10 % of its scheduled implementation cost. If the same error is found on the design phase the correction cost is 50%, if found in the coding / parameterization is 100%, if found in the unit resting is 200% and if found in the acceptance testing, the correction cost is at least 500% or the initial cost scheduled for the implementation of that software element (requirement, function, etc). The US DoD in the eighties had only 2% of the projects developed delivered on time, budget and quality. 3% of the projects were accepted with revisions, 19% was installed but never used, 46% was delivered but never installed and use, and 30% never delivered but paid !!!
This striking reality made the US DoD and the US government to reconsider their investments on project management and technocratic development initiatives, processes and methodologies. But despite their efforts not much seems to have been accomplished. Only NASA, lost more than 9$ billion in 2002, from bad contract management practices in the development of the International Space Station with Boeing.
Current statistics indicate that 66% problems still fail due to bad requirements and more than 45 % due to bad design. Industry data also indicates that 26% of software projects failed outright and 46% experienced cost and schedule overruns.
It is amazing how ugly those statistics get when they measure ITC projects implementation at a period of time where everyone has to either invest on ICT or die. Successful project management initiatives have a return on investment at least 88%, but despite this high ROI very few organizations invest on project management methodologies or services.
All organizations in the world can be placed in two categories a far as their technologies concern, those who buy (acquire) and those who make (develop). Organizations acquiring technology seek methodological support since they might have limited resources, know-how, capability or the technology development process is not part of their operations.
Those organizations have no structured internal IT departments that can support of fulfill development or even project management needs. They usually restrict the activities of their IT professionals, if any, to support their users. Information systems are rarely developed, personnel can not be reserved for systems development, the technologies that exist in the organizations are straight forward need not much effort in maintenance and no serious reason exist for the organization to invest in an internal development unit.
On the other hand, organizations developing technology, seek methodological support to protect their organizational internal technological strategy, structure and operations, or need to control all technological and technocratic investments under specific processes at specific times. These organizations use their methodologies to be independent from other technology providers, and have many projects to developed internally. These organizations probably have internal teams that can carry on the responsibilities of systems development, and have structured information technology department not only for the development of their internal technologies but also for the ones they intend to develop as organizational products and services.
All the above cases form the market where ICT project management methodologies can be used. A huge market, constantly growing as organizations tend to be software intensive day by day, expecting to secure their organizational operations via successful ICT adaptation, reduce the risk of an ICT initiatives and investments, assure profitability and return on the ICT investments.
The project management market is wide open of agile methodologies that can be used successfully for ICT project management and the ICT oriented projects or process organizational re-engineering initiatives. Just taking into account that the budget for project management in a project varies from 10% to 20% (including quality assurance), and also take into consideration that the European Union only will spend only for the FP7 program 55 billion € in the next years, and more than 10 billion € from that budget will go for the PM products and services and probably more than 5 other billions will be spend for the development of management processes and methods towards the implementation support of other research ideas and proposals .
The EU projects are not the only one PM project source. A brief look of the five year plans prepared and executed by the ICT ministries in the European Union countries it is easy to calculate the volume of ICT projects implemented. Greece for example will spend for the next five years 25 billion euros in non defense ICT infrastructure. The overall ICT projects planned for the European governments for the next five years in more than 500 billion € leaving room for more than 70 billion € for project management services. As the European Union is considered one region or country, every organization has the right to participate in every project in every country. 90% of the EU R&D or national infrastructure projects require consortiums of organizations to participate in the bidding or proposal process, using on the other hand systematically ICT project management methodologies since the management approach proposed for the implementation of a project is highly evaluated.
Large scale projects cannot rely on super programmers or number-tracking managers. Specialized ICT project management agile methodologies can be offered to large scale ICT integrators or technology providers in order for them to reduce the implementation and management cost tremendously.
The 75 billion € + budget available only in Europe for project management is only part of the market. No ICT project budgets have been calculated for the ICT investments made in the private sectors in Europe, and no budgets have been calculated for ICT initiatives from the European private and public sector.
The European Union, and all the other national and international projects are not the only market for the project management methodologies. Many organizations are specialized in project management processional services. It is indicated that 35% of those ICT projects implemented in Europe, outsource the project management in specialized ICT organizations who use agile project management methodologies to provide project management services for projects of every type, size, budget and technology.
The years that projects managed by heroic teams and ad hoc processes must go, and all organizations launching ICT projects need to aware of the project management methods that will be used towards their project implementation. ARIADNE is a methodology that can successfully be adopted by any organization for any project type regardless its size, complexity, technology, schedule or budget. The innovative and technological coherence of ARIADNE with many international standards and best practices makes ARIADNE a true agile methodology.
The ARIADNE Methodology is a project management methodology for the development and acquisition process of information systems and technological investments. The methodology is separated into two prime sub-methodologies that can cover any type of information technology project, process and investment.
The first one, the ARIADNE-PM (Project Management), approaches completely the processes related primarily to the management of information systems acquisition projects, and used by organizations purchasing technology or invest on a technological and technocratic corporate initiative and investment.
The second one, the ARIADNE-SE (Systems Engineering), approaches completely the processes related to the development of an information system and used by organizations that develop technology for either internal or external projects or products.
The size and agility of ARIADNE is obtained by the 40 phases of Ariadne, the 467 stagers, 5.727 processes, 538 deliverables, 1.992 forms, 1.440 inspections, 1342 critical points, 2.391 meetings, and 1.080 milestones of various types.
All that multiplied by two since ARIADNE can be used for the Software and the non software oriented project. Then these figures can be multiplied by five (5) since each phase in ARIADNE is offered in five different execution versions. The combinations of phases that can be generated with ARIADNE are nearly 540 = 9.094.947.017.729.282.379.150.390.625 ways to use the methodology. Certainly there one that fits even the most demanding organization.
The same flexibility and combinations are also present in the ARIADNE pricing model. The methodology costs according to the number of phases and processes used to create the proper methodology to manage a specific project. The development of the thousands processes in ARIADNE came after an exhaustive study of 116 international project management methodologies.
ARIADNE includes in its own way the best of the best practices found in those methodologies, while other processes and practices developed from scratch by EMPROSS. Today ARIADNE can be considered fully compliant with 24 international methodologies and quite compliant with 26 other.
The agility of the methodology is strongly present and on the way the methodology is used. More than 10 different ways are available to use the methodology and a number or techniques support this adjustability and agility with process mutation principles.
On the other hand, the same flexibility can be found on the software tools supporting ARIADNE which allow the organizations re-adjust the tools to cover a specific methodological approach selected for a project.
ARIADNE is a methodological framework through which methodologies are generated per case, and project.
An ARIADNE methodology can have 5 processes or 5.000 processes, can be used in projects of 10.000 € budget and in projects of 100.000.000 € budget, in project with 1 staff month effort and in projects with 5.000 staff months effort, in small organizations and in huge organizations, etc.
ARIADNE is one of a kind, a leader in modern project management, an effective and reliable faster cheaper better methodology.
Extensive research is in progress today, for the new Archetypical Ariadne, a new version utilizing sign theory techniques, knowledge management and processes engineering, supported by an environment that learns form the usage and the users of the methodology. This new approach, that will manage use habits and patterns to manage organizational behaviour will control the risks and restrict the stupidity found today in most project managers, and not in the methods.
Primarily all software intensive organizations can use ARIADNE. The ARIADNE Methodology supports the project management process for the development and / or acquisition of any type information technology project for every kind of organization.
Organizations that can use the ARIADNE Methodology are all the technocratic ones of the Private and Public Sector, meeting one or more of the following characteristics:
· Develop information systems as their end products.
· Develop information systems as part of their end products.
· Develop information systems towards their internal operations process improvement through internal structured IT departments.
· Acquire information systems as part of integrated technological projects.
· Acquire information systems as part of technological investments.
· Manage the development or acquisition of information systems without a structured approach.
· Implement a corporate technocratic strategy.
Today ARIADNE has been purchased and used in more than 80 organizations in seven countries in different sectors.
It must be noted that most of the ARIADNE users, besides the ICT sector are in the financial sector as well (Banking, Securities, and insurance organizations) using ARIADNE not only for the management of the ICT projects they develop or acquire, but also as ICT processes for their daily ICT operations. ARIADNE includes also special process modules focused in the ICT security, procurement, contracting, change management and in other areas, that suit perfectly the needs of many organizations process wise.
The ARIADNE methodology has been developed in its current version after many years of exhaustive research and development, completely financed by EMPROSS SITC and its Managing Director Dr. Evangelos Markopoulos. More than 20 engineers and managers from the academic and business world invested more than 30 years of research and development.
The ARIADNE Methodology belongs 100% to EMPROSS Strategic IT Consultants, www.empross.com . Managing Director of EMPROSS SITC is Dr. Evangelos Markopoulos.
As of today there is no other methodology like ARIADNE in the international project management community. Many methodologies proposed what needs to be done but give not template and do not actually show and guide to user to do it right. Others are too technical, formal, bureaucratic, difficult to adjust, targeted on a specific market, etc. ARIADNE has no such restrictions. ARIADNE is the definition of Agility, announcing the agility concept before many project management organizations and institutes identified it. ARIADNE is a methodology of methodologies, a methodology generator.
The small competition that might probably exist will be probably eliminated once ARIADNE develops its state of the art software tools and services already designed and in the development process. The new ARIADNE tools will be based on an expert system artificial intelligence project management generator that will perform an assessment to the organization, identify the project needs, goals and constraints and propose the methodology that suites best the project using ARIADNE processes. This methodology could be purchases as hard copy, with or without a software tools supporting it, or can be ‘rented’ as Software as a Service, via the internet, where the customer will be using a specific methodology for a specific project, for a specific time at a specific cost.
Detailed Presentation of the ARIADNE Methodology.
A extensive presentation of the ARIADNE Methodology can be found at the official site of EMPROSS SITC, www.empross.com
It is in our intention to transfer in the near future all the ARIADNE Methodology into this site along with other ARIADNE Methodology applications, templates, references, publications, cases studies and documentation enough to justify the creation of a dedicated site to ARIADNE.
For any further information on the ARIADNE Methodology please contact :
Name : Dr. Evangelos Markopoulos
Telephone : 0030-210-6753-376,
Fax : 0030-210-6754-727
e-mail : epm@ariadne-methodology.com
Address : Konitsis 3-5, Maroussi, Attica Athens, GREECE
