Developing project management methodologies to improve value creation of business intelligence implementation projects

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Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

School of Business | Master's thesis

Authors

Date

2019

Department

Tieto- ja palvelujohtamisen laitos

Major/Subject

Mcode

Degree programme

Information and Service Management (ISM)

Language

en

Pages

75 + 13

Series

Abstract

This master’s thesis develops the project management methodologies of a business intelligence consultancy firm in order to improve the value creation of services provided to customers. The focus of the research is to determine how project management should be organized to suit the industry, how customer understanding of the benefits of the services can be facilitated and why implementation projects fail to meet requirements. The literature review conducted in this research handles three topics connected to the firm’s business environment and forms the theoretical framework against which the empirical research is compared. The three topics reviewed are project management methodologies, benefits management and decision-making process transformation. A review of recent academic literature on project management methodologies reveals that agile implementation is the significant factor to effective project management. Benefits management reveals the importance of aligning projects with overall business strategies to maximize value and benefits attained. Decision-making process transformation reveals the differences between how executives make decisions and use decision-support tools. The empirical section focuses on interviewing the firm’s consultants and participant observations of the researcher to identify critical issues and key development needs of the current project management model being used in the firm. The main findings made are that more agile and flexible methods are needed to enable handling inherent changes in projects, communication with the customer needs to be improved to facilitate better customer guidance and management, and more structured focus needs to be given to the testing and feedback processes to ensure quality and evaluate performance. Based on the literature review and empirical findings, two alternative recommendations are given to develop current practice. The first suggestion is a newly created project management model, called the waterwheel model, that introduces a hybrid approach by focusing on structured practices at the beginning and at the end of projects and focusing on agility in the implementation phase. The second suggestion introduces a modified scrum model that focuses on flexibility and collaboration instead of heavy structure and regulation. Both models aim to switch the firm’s mentality of producing products in projects to producing services in continuous development cycles, which is what customers seem to demand more and more in the modern business environment.

Description

Thesis advisor

Rossi, Matti

Keywords

business intelligence, project management, consulting, value creation, business development, decision support systems

Other note

Citation

Permanent link to this item

https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:aalto-201909225419

Collections

[gradu] Kauppakorkeakoulu / BIZ