Project management is an important concept in business development. Often, the development of information technology or managing change will be run as projects, and managed using various well established project management techniques and tools. E-banking is often treated like a large scale project and broken into several small scale projects to manage various different aspects (called project portfolios), ranging from BPR to make the organization ready for online operations, to actual implementation of e-banking technologies.
TopProject Planning
E-banking is often a large scale business initiative requiring large scale financial investment as well as the availability of a pool of human resources with a range of specialist skills such as technological, marketing, change management and project management. Aladwani, (2001) suggests that offering an e-banking system proceeds through three generic phases, pre-development, development, and post-development. The pre-development stage is the period before the development of a bank’s online services. At this phase, the idea of implementation of e-banking attracts top management and the benefits/pressures of initiating e-banking become irresistible. The development phase includes implementation of e- banking related systems and necessary changes in the organizational structure and culture. The second phase involves several managerial and technical issues, discussed in previous chapters that need to be addressed. The last phase, post-development, includes a number of activities such as maintenance of systems, continuous update of the website, evaluation of services, and implementing any necessary changes. For this phase, bank’s management needs to understand a range of new marketing, product development and innovative delivery methods to ensure the success of the project.
A number of e-banking development, implementation and management activities become independent projects themselves so that e-banking as a whole requires programme management rather than just project management. For example, the e-banking adoption process has to be carefully planned and executed and is often seen as a project in its own right. From an IT project point of view, time and budget constraints could prove to be serious problems, as would be the handling of any organizational transformation processes. To deal with these issues, support from top management is seen as a key ingredient for success of an e-banking project. E-banking needs a champion amongst top management (generally the board of directors). Lack of senior management support is a major restriction to e-banking because, without it, obtaining the required resources to bring about the necessary changes in an organization can prove impossible.