Managing software developing projects

Master's Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject Business economics - Business Management Corporate Governance grade: 1 University of Salzburg (Universita?tslehrgang Executive Master in Management - MIM) language: English abstract: In the last decades Information Technology (IT) has become vital for every company. And a company not using IT would be unimaginable today. Primarily IT was merely used for accelerating existent processes. Mostly standardised applications have been deployed to standard areas in companies (for example accounting software). Today IT is an important part for modelling all types of business processes not only the standardised processes. Furthermore to gain competitive advantages mere standard software is not suitable anymore. This is because standard software can not support the requirements of individualised processes necessary for doing business better than the competitor. Therefore either standard software is customised for supporting individualised processes or a company decides developing individualised software from the scratch.Often companies decide to develop individualised software on their own because of the following three reasons: First the process knowledge is important for gaining competitive advantages and this confidential information must kept inside the company. Second employees within the organisation have the best process knowledge. Effective transfer of process knowledge to the IT-department can be guaranteed. Third customising standard software needs much external expertise which is in general expensive.Often software development projects have budgets of several million Euros and can cause an even higher reduction of costs. Thus process and software development has become one of the most important aspects for many IT-departments in today's companies. However managing software developing projects is not an easy task. Many software developing projects are not on time and budget. An analysis of the