Managing Large-scale IT Projects: The Case of National Air Traffic Services' New En Route Centre at Swanwick

Abstract

UK experience with implementation of high-profile IT projects has been rather unhappy,with projects tending to be severely delayed, to operate poorly and to be prone to escalating costs. Thereis therefore a need to understand better and to improve the management of such investments. This paperadopts a synthetic approach to analysing large-scale IT projects, drawing upon research on managinginflexible technology, project managememt and information technology implementation. The papercombines findings from these literatures to produce a detailed set of factors that are known to adverselyaffect ambitious soflware and other large-scale development projects. It employs a case study of sotftwaredevelopment at National Air Trafic Services' NERG project at Swanwick potentially to illustrate these.The paper finds that experimce at Swanwick does indeed mirror many of the pitfalls predicted but alsothat the synthesis of approaches attempted enhances our understanding of the difficulties involved inmanaging large-scale IT projects perhaps rather better than univocal approaches.