This book is about delivering IT projects in a world where on-time and on-budget is not enough. You need to be on-line--connecting to the Internet and dealing with the 24-by-7 expectations of your customers and partners. It will help you successfully maneuver through the ice floes of IT project management in an industry with a notoriously high project failure rate.
Imagine you are in one of Titanic's lifeboats just sighted by the rescue ship Carpathia. As you look back at the wreckage site, you wonder how such a disaster could have happened. What were the causes? How could things go so badly wrong? Why did she founder? No one had expected it.
Titanic's maiden voyage was a disaster waiting to happen as a result of the compromises made in the project. This book by IBM Senior e-business Consultant, Mark Kozak-Holland, explores how non-IT executives can take lessons from a nuts-and-bolts construction project like Titanic and use those lessons to ensure the right approach to developing on-line operations. Looking at this historical project as a model will prove to be incisive as it cuts away the layers of IT jargon and complexity.
This book outlines the stages involved in creating mission critical e-business services and the underlying environment to support these. Specifically, the book provides the non-technical manager a step-by-step guide to the deliverables that the IT department should produce at each stage of the creation process. The book enlightens the non-technical manager to the fact that a considerable part of the effort is in realigning the organization and procedures rather than technology. Knowing the rationale for and the timing of deliverables enables the non-IT manager to be a full participant in the creation process.
On-line On-time On-budget leaves the reader with a simple philosophy: namely, focus your IT investments on getting your organization and procedures aligned and you can get best-in-class results from your technology. Who would have expected Titanic's sister ship the Olympic to serve a distinguished 24 year career before being scraped as obsolete? The Olympic was nick named old reliable having served as a troop carrier during World War I and evading attack by German torpedoes.
The book uses close to 90 figures and more than 40 tables for clarification of major concepts through detailed models, e.g., Change Management (9-step model) and Problem Management (4-step model).
About the Author
Mark specializes in helping organizations evaluate how enabling technologies can impact their business and enhance existing business processes to the customer. Mark has over 19 years of systems integration and services experience. This consists of 14 years of management consulting experience gained internationally across a number of industries.
Mark has recently authored an e-business book titled “On-line, On-time, On-budget, Titanic lessons for the e-business executive”. The book explains in layman's terms how to get involved and deliver an Internet project successfully. It relies on the use of a highly vivid and well-known example of a project gone wrong, through the luxury liner Titanic. It is designed to help executives understand the phases of a project life cycle systematically and draws on the loss of Titanic in order to clarify the basic business issues in designing, building and implementing a new online system from beginning to end.
Mark is passionate about history and advocates that we move through repeating cycles of historical change. Paying attention to how historical projects and emerging technologies of the past solved complex problems of the day provides some very valuable insight into how to solve today’s more challenging business problems. Mark holds a BSc degree with Joint Honours in Computer Science and Statistics 1980-1983 (University of Salford, UK).



Mark Kozak-Holland