Applitude

There are two reasons that determine if a project is an IT project or not. Projects aim to raise the return on invested capital; the two main enablers are to save money or raise the perceived customer value. Either you become more efficient or you get new opportunities. There is often a combination of these two where projects aim to both get new opportunities and save money at the same time. If the first priority is to get new opportunities and raising the perceived customer value the marketers will probably be your customers. And if the main enabler is saving money, you customer will probably be a administrative manager.

This knowledge that it either cost or new opportunity focus is important when you analyzing requirements and do privatizations. You might have a lot of different stakeholders and users that you need to interview and it might be hard to understand what they really wish to accomplish with a specific feature or demand. Then it can be helpful to think is this a cost saver or a new opportunity? And if you plan a project and come up with a plan you might surprised that you customer will be negative and worried if you after interviewing different stakeholders and users comes back with only features that enables new opportunities when the customer did expect cost saving features.