Risk Management in Challenging Business Software Projects

Wednesday, September 11^th from 14⁰⁰ - 15³⁰

The vision of eBusiness demands for overall business processes that cross enterprises and link together business partners of 'different worlds'. Today's business processes are dealing with sophisticated business-to-business relationships and elaborate software integrations in order to allow all application systems along the process chain to communicate and cooperate with each other. This makes business software projects increasingly complex and leads to an escalating risk of project failure or bust budgets. Practical experience shows that project risks will significantly decrease if Risk Management becomes an essential part of Business Requirements Engineering.

First of all, Risk Management needs a comprehensive project support environment built on an integrated Repository. This is to implement a set of project performance indicators (PPI) with respect to quality, cost, and time. PPIs are monitored on a regular basis and simulation is used for predictive monitoring to detect project risks as early as possible.

The major challenge of eBusiness comes from the uncertainty of the future business environment, in particular the behavior of the external process partners. Therefore business requirements must be specified in terms of a predicted business context model (business scenarios). Simulation is key to develop a requirements specification that is able to deal with fuzzy or changing business context models.

In practice, risk management issues lead to novel client-supplier relationships where project results are defined in terms of business performance instead of functionality and technical performance. The client-supplier contract defines business performance indicators and the supplier must commit to given target values. This leads to novel project certification procedures as well as new pricing models.

Dr. Frank Schoenthaler, born in 1959, studied Information Systems and Business Engineering at the University of Karlsruhe, Germany obtaining his Diploma degree in 1984 and his Doctoral degree in 1989. In his doctoral thesis he presented an innovative approach for information system development based on rapid prototyping. In 1990 he founded PROMATIS and worked as a senior consultant, trainer and project manager for PROMATIS's early customer projects. As President and CEO, Dr Schoenthaler keeps all team members focused on the PROMATIS vision of delivering best-in-class software products and solutions to help organizations on their way to global knowledge leadership.

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