Volkswagen of America
Project Risk and Cost Management
Case Study
Volkswagen of America: Managing IT Priorities
Group Members: Divya Yadav, Lamia Nafees, Ashwin Chadaga, Deeshanu Sharma
Executive Summary:
This summary is about the Volkswagen of America, which had two major concerns: defining the governance and development of the process directives. Matulovic, the new chief information officer, faced a lot of issues such as new business architecture, inadequate funding and increasing pressure from his peers. As in the past, company had undergone the cycle of ups and downs, VWAG started diversifying its product offerings in the early 2000s. Therefore, VWoA, an American subsidiary, began responding to these new initiatives by improving the structures of their processes so as to meet this new global diversification strategy. IT was one of the key areas affected by this change and had to adapt to this new paradigm as well as to other changes such as e-Commerce applications. They implemented a new process where the submitted projects from all the business units over three phases were reviewed and the one that aligned with the company goals was selected. But, after going through the first iteration, the business managers realized that there were some obvious problems with the new prioritization process. Many factors such as high costs for existing legacy system, budget constraints and a complex prioritization process contributed to these problems. Furthermore, the high level business managers believed that the IT costs were high in comparison to the actual benefits that were delivered. Thus, for VWoA to go forward and increasing its revenues and operations, it must undertake a strategy to keep its IT Platform and architecture up thereby making it a strategic asset of the company.
The management should include the following points:
• IT budget should be increased
• Prioritization process should be simplified
• Leveraging legacy systems with a SOA architecture
•
Case Study
Volkswagen of America: Managing IT Priorities
Group Members: Divya Yadav, Lamia Nafees, Ashwin Chadaga, Deeshanu Sharma
Executive Summary:
This summary is about the Volkswagen of America, which had two major concerns: defining the governance and development of the process directives. Matulovic, the new chief information officer, faced a lot of issues such as new business architecture, inadequate funding and increasing pressure from his peers. As in the past, company had undergone the cycle of ups and downs, VWAG started diversifying its product offerings in the early 2000s. Therefore, VWoA, an American subsidiary, began responding to these new initiatives by improving the structures of their processes so as to meet this new global diversification strategy. IT was one of the key areas affected by this change and had to adapt to this new paradigm as well as to other changes such as e-Commerce applications. They implemented a new process where the submitted projects from all the business units over three phases were reviewed and the one that aligned with the company goals was selected. But, after going through the first iteration, the business managers realized that there were some obvious problems with the new prioritization process. Many factors such as high costs for existing legacy system, budget constraints and a complex prioritization process contributed to these problems. Furthermore, the high level business managers believed that the IT costs were high in comparison to the actual benefits that were delivered. Thus, for VWoA to go forward and increasing its revenues and operations, it must undertake a strategy to keep its IT Platform and architecture up thereby making it a strategic asset of the company.
The management should include the following points:
• IT budget should be increased
• Prioritization process should be simplified
• Leveraging legacy systems with a SOA architecture
•