Project Management (PM) typically plays a supporting yet very important role in enterprise IT projects, focusing on ensuring that timelines are met and that all the cross-functional teams involved in a complex IT program are coordinated and moving in lockstep.
While generally viewed as a support arm, the PM organization is extremely valuable to the procurement function, and can have a significant positive impact on procurement strategies and outcomes, specifically in terms of reducing costs.
Project managers are in the unique position of being directly involved in the initial planning and implementation stages of all of the factors critical to the success of an IT project. These include managing the scope, schedule, quality, cost, risk and resources involved. As such, PM is uniquely positioned to enhance procurement’s ability to negotiate effective agreements, ensure collaboration between business and technical teams on requirements, mitigate risk and optimize spending.
This ISG white paper examines four key attributes of PM and how they can be leveraged to enhance sourcing strategy and improve supplier relationships.
About the author
Tyrone Magby
Tyrone has over 15 years of IT strategic sourcing, consulting, operations, and crisis management experience and has led over 200 IT sourcing projects. He has held senior strategic sourcing positions at Xerox, BellSouth, DS Waters and Fiserv prior to becoming the Director of the Hardware & Software Group. His negotiation expertise includes, but is not limited to Hardware; Software; Maintenance; Professional Services; Desktop/Laptop; Thin Client, Mainframe; Distributed Servers, SAAS solutions, pCards, Fulfillment, Lockboxes and more. Tyrone has a wide negotiation range perfect for analyzing IT environments to identify and realize IT cost reduction opportunity.
