Smart Business: Making Sure Investments in Information Technology Hit the Mark Every Time!

by Barry Sheehy and Dave L. Chapman

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1890009946
• ISBN13: 9781890009946
• Release Date: May 2002
• Publisher: Executive Excellence Publishing
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 1.31 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Risk management

This book teaches one how to manage and evaluate risks and opportunities. Risk comes with innovation. Risk comes from change. Risk is all around us. There is risk from non-action as well as action. Most all opportunities come bundled with risks. Although this book does not expose every element of managing risk it does tell you how to dig deeper and find the resources for effective risk management. This book teaches that a business has within itself the knowledge base to manage its own risk when properly focused and directed. An excellent book.

Values based approach in IT PM

I bought this book 1 year ago because it made references to the Challenger accident, which made quite an impression on me ever since I started following investigations analysis reports after reading about Challenger in Richard Feynman's book, "What Do you Care What Other People Think" many many years ago. Besides programming books, I have many project management and business and finance books on my book shelves already, so I wasn't looking to purchase another business IT project management book. In my opinion, this book will appeal immediately to technical people who likes engineers than business people or their business-minded boss. For the content itself, Mike's review below provide a very good detailed insight into the material. The ideas does have practical applicability, but it does make me wonder if I am being persuaded into the glorification of Northpoint's services, bcos technically I do not think it's easy attempt the actuarial approach. Besides the quantitative approach, the values and judgement approach is really on the side of soft skills, I think anyone who can make the business/engineer/finance people buy into what he/she believes and is doing will likely do well in career and rise into leadership positions. But this book is a bit unconventional in its treatment of the project management, it takes an interesting approach from the human values perspective and challenges conventional approaches to the perception of valuation in business IT. Finally, I am not too sure whether there's any subtle hidden marketing intention behind the publication of this book for Northpoint company, of which the author is the founder and CEO of. In any case, I still like this book and I am writing here because I am recommmending this book to my friend to read now.

Serendipity

I purchased this book on a whim expecting another mediocre book on IT business investment. Instead I got a deeply influential book about how to effectively assure project success and realize best value from IT investments.This book maintains a brisk, but easy-to-follow pace - by page 18 you get nine unwarranted beliefs about the reasons who IT initiatives fail and well crafted counter arguments to dispel them. This leads into a well written chapter on pathologies of failure and patterns of disaster, which the rest of the book addresses in the form of a methodology that integrates risk, value and gap analysis to give a clear map to assuring success.Part I contains seven chapters that discuss the underlying elements of the methods, including risk management, value management, process management, measurement and assessment. These are the knowledge areas and tools. Among the tools are business initiative value assessments, business knowledge value, progress and performance curves, and risk-to-value analysis.Part II consists of seven more chapters that provide case studies to illustrate a failed project and how the authors' methods apply. Five of the chapters in this section deal in detail with closing leadership, knowledge, process, resources and judgement gaps. One of the core measurements used is knowledge, experience and performance used to identify and close gaps that threaten project and IT initiatives.I especially liked the way the authors frame value propositions, which includes a list of 22 major values (each of which can have many sub values), and how these are divided into hard and soft values. What makes this useful is the fact that each value can be quantified. These are augmented by five key questions about the value proposition to validate it. In each of the gaps discussed in Part II are equally useful checklists and questions. This material transforms the authors' approach from theory to the practical and is one of the reasons I was deeply influenced by the book.There are also parts of the book that I take issue with: the authors never miss an opportunity to 'plug' their consulting company. This is more of an irritant than a real problem. Also, as I was reading the book it seemed as though I would need their services in order to get a complete picture. As it turns out everything you need is in the book, but it was still a distraction. Quibbles aside I think that the approach the authors give in this book and the valuable checklists and questionnaires that are included make this one of the best books one can reference for assuring the success of IT initiatives.