Managing E-Business Challenges

Managing E-Business Challenges
A major challenge facing organizations is how to manage E-Business and other projects involving multiple organizations, both internally and externally.

This is often made more complex of the team members are distributed geographically and belong to a variety of different companies.

A typical E-Business effort might involve over ten internal departments, three to four consulting firms, and suppliers. Traditional project management methods were not designed for this situation. Most projects were managed as centralized, traditional projects – certainly not the case for E-business.

Some additional factors that pertain to E-Business are:

• The systems have to be able to be interfaced so that on-line E-Business transactions are supported. This has a major impact on the IT resources related to programming.
• Technology has to be enhanced and standardized – an effort that affects the support and operations side of IT.
• Organization and process changes have to be implemented across departments in a coordinated manner.
• Different consultants who may be competitors have to work to support E-Business.
• Supplier coordination to streamline the supply chain with E-Business requires extensive coordination.

The complexity need for commitment and involvement, and scope of E-business efforts make them candidates for collaborative work and scheduling.

More specific challenges are:

• The culture and interests differ among team members and companies.

• Many individuals assigned to the project have normal, nonproject duties that they cannot give up for E-business; dividing their time between E-Business and their other work is a major challenges.

• Different companies may employ a variety of IT methods and tools that do not easily support integration, which leads to incompatibilities.

• E-Business subprojects have hidden dependencies that are revealed only later in the work at critical times.

• The goals of E-Business may seem very general and may not relevant to many of the team members.

At the heart of these issue is the fact that the E-Business leaders do not have total authority over members of the project team.

E-Business project leaders do not generally allocate the money or the people. They are organizers, directors and coordinators-like directors for movies.
Managing E-Business Challenges