SIDEBAR: How to Select the Right Project for Your First Post-Implementation Audit

Small is better, especially in the beginning

If your first post-implementation audit (PIA) goes smoothly, you'll be more inclined to make them a standard step in your project life cycle. The trick to ensuring that your first audit goes off without a hitch is to pick the right project, says Barbara Gomolski, a research director for Gartner (US).

Auditing projects that are "a political minefield where results are inconclusive", won't inspire anyone to perform PIAs regularly, she says. Instead, she tells her clients to "go for the low-hanging fruit". By low-hanging fruit, Gomolski means projects that have a fairly specific expected financial return and that are sponsored by a cooperative business unit. If the business unit members that cosponsored the project are easy to work with, they'll be more likely to give the audit team the information and feedback it needs during the audit phase of the project.

She also suggests that CIOs audit projects that involve software or technologies that are going to be around for a while. If the audit reveals the system did not yield the expected benefits, the CIO has time to figure out why that is and what to do about it.

The first project Bruce Higgins, CIO of engineering and construction company Michael Baker Corporation, ever audited in his career followed similar guidelines. In January 2002, Higgins installed an automated, Web-based system for procuring IT hardware and software from ASP ePlus. Before, procurement had been a costly, time-consuming, paper-based, people-intensive process. Higgins hoped the new, Web-based system would be a clear improvement over the old process and would yield a system that was easy to use and would lead to cost-savings, improved quality of service and a faster procurement cycle. The project team listed those expectations in a business case for the project. They also scoped out all the work involved with getting the new system up and running. As the project's scope changed, the implementation team wrote change orders with the executive sponsor's authorisation, and brought the changes to the users' attention so they wouldn't be surprised by the system or its actual cost once the implementation was complete.

While the audit had a few hiccups, it was an overall success. It went well because Higgins chose to audit a project that was small in scope, had clear benefits that were defined up front and recorded in the business case, and because the implementation team documented all changes in scope. As a result, it was relatively easy for the audit team to compare the new systems' expected benefits and cost savings with the actual benefits and ROI. Because the process went so smoothly and because his company learned from the audit how to better manage projects, Higgins plans to conduct PIAs on all strategic IT projects, including an ERP system in January 2004.

"You really get an understanding of how to run your IT projects better," says Higgins in regard to PIAs. "You can throw stones at the one you've just implemented, praise yourself for the things you did right, criticise yourself for things you did wrong, understand why they went wrong. and how you can make them better on other projects throughout your enterprise."

Higgins says PIAs are also useful in determining if you've actualised your financial return from the system: "We figured out a real way to establish whether or not there was an ROI on the project by collecting and analysing data. Now we have a process that we can utilise on other IT projects throughout our enterprise that will allow us to evaluate the savings and efficiencies we created in streamlining processes by implementing new pieces of software."