What is project management for IT projects?
IT project management applies proven project management principles to the often unpredictable world of information technology. This work involves planning, executing, monitoring, and controlling IT projects from the start to final delivery.
The main goal is to make sure new software solutions, systems, and technological infrastructure align with an organization's business priorities. An effective IT project manager is skilled at navigating the complexities of software development, network upgrades, and data migration while managing resources and risks.
Effective IT project management provides a foundation for successful technology initiatives. It’s a comprehensive way to guide a project toward its intended results, ensuring it meets stakeholder needs on time and within budget.
Types of IT projects
The world of IT projects includes several different types. Each kind of project has its own unique goals, challenges, and requirements. The specific nature of the work helps a project manager and their team decide on the best approach.
Software development projects: These initiatives create new software applications or improve existing ones. The goal is often to enhance daily operations, internal productivity, or the customer experience. A key element of these projects is a focus on iterative development, with continuous feedback and testing to ensure seamless integration with other systems.
IT infrastructure projects: These projects involve building, upgrading, or maintaining an organization's foundational hardware, networks, and servers. Examples include network security enhancements, data center migrations, or server upgrades. The primary goals are to ensure systems are reliable and scalable, reduce long-term maintenance costs, and strengthen overall security.
Cloud migration projects: This common project type moves an organization's data, applications, and workloads from a local, on-premise system to one that is cloud-based. Project managers must carefully plan this transition to avoid disrupting daily operations. Important considerations for these projects include protecting data, staying compliant with regulations, and controlling costs.
Cybersecurity projects: With the rising frequency and sophistication of cyberattacks, these high-risk and complex projects are a top priority. They can include implementing firewalls, adopting data encryption, or conducting employee training on security protocols. A project manager's role is to ensure these projects are finished on time and meet all relevant compliance standards.
Digital transformation projects: These broad projects integrate digital technologies across the entire organization to improve productivity, the customer experience, and innovation. This can involve implementing automation, integrating AI, or using data analytics to enable more data-driven decision-making.
The IT project management life cycle
An IT project typically moves through five interconnected phases that make up its life cycle. This structured approach provides a clear project roadmap, ensuring that each stage is finished with a specific project objective in mind.
The process begins with initiation, where a project is evaluated for its viability, followed by planning, where the team breaks down complex work into manageable tasks and drafts a detailed plan. The project then moves into the execution phase, when the plan is put into action and the team carries out the planned tasks, develops solutions, and tests functionality. This stage often requires flexibility to handle unforeseen challenges.
As the project is being executed, the monitoring and control phase happens at the same time to ensure the project stays on course. The project manager continuously tracks the project’s progress against the project plan, assesses key metrics, and makes necessary adjustments to manage risks and keep the project moving toward its goals. Finally, during the closing phase, the team finalizes all deliverables, evaluates performance, and documents lessons learned, providing a structured conclusion to the entire project lifecycle.
For more on project life cycle and challenges, see IT Project Management: A Complete Guide for Modern Teams.
Project management methodologies: traditional vs. agile
Project management for IT has two main approaches: traditional and agile. The traditional Waterfall model is a step-by-step process where each phase must be finished before the next one starts. It's best for projects with requirements that are clear and won't change.
In contrast, agile values adaptability and flexibility. Agile teams work in short, repeated cycles, making it easier to respond to changes. Popular agile frameworks like Scrum use short "sprints" to complete tasks, while Kanban uses a visual board to track progress in real time.
The move toward agile doesn't mean structure is gone. It just means adapting to complexity is a bigger priority. Many IT project management software, such as Lark and Jira, can support both agile and Waterfall methods. This shows that the project's plan and workflow should be decided first. A team should choose its approach, then select a tool that best supports it, rather than trying to fit its process into a tool.
For more details on these two methodologies, see Waterfall vs. Agile: Which Project Management Methodology Is Right for You in 2025?
Best practices for modern IT teams
Mastering the project scope and preventing scope creep
A key best practice in IT project management is to clearly define the project scope from the very beginning. The project scope establishes the boundaries and deliverables, ensuring everyone on the team understands what the project includes and what it doesn't. This helps prevent scope creep, which simply means a project’s scope expanding without adjusting to the project timeline, budget, or resources.
When a project's scope expands unexpectedly, it's a sign of a breakdown in communication and stakeholder management. Research links a clearly defined scope to a shared understanding among all team members, which helps to avoid deviations from project goals.
To complement this, regular stakeholder engagement and communication can identify potential issues early. A project manager's vital role is to facilitate this alignment, making sure everyone is on the same page as the project moves forward.
Proactive risk management
Risk management is an ongoing process that helps ensure a project's health and successful outcomes. The process involves five key steps: identifying potential issues, analyzing their likelihood and impact, prioritizing the most critical risks, developing a response plan, and continuously monitoring throughout the project's duration.
Project managers have four main strategies for dealing with risks: avoid, transfer, mitigate, and accept. For instance, a team might choose a proven technology over an experimental one to avoid potential technical risks.
Managing risk is a team effort and not something a single person does alone. While a project manager can assign a dedicated risk manager to oversee the process, a project's health truly depends on a culture of risk accountability.
Every team member should feel responsible for spotting potential issues. This is why many organizations add "project risks" as a standing agenda item for all team meetings. This bottom-up approach empowers team members to flag risks without fear of reprisal, ensuring the project manager is not left to identify every critical task or potential problem on their own.
Effective communication and stakeholder engagement
An IT project's success depends on the ability to keep all team members, project managers, and stakeholders aligned. A project manager's ability to communicate clearly is paramount. This means being concise and action-oriented in messages, using plain language, and using formatting to make written communications scannable.
Communication is a strategic tool for building rapport and managing perception. The goal is to "manage their perceptions of the project," which helps build support and champion the initiative. When stakeholders feel informed and heard, they are more likely to support the project and continue doing so when challenges inevitably arise.
Teams face a major problem when they use too many tools for communication and project management, which creates a "new hazard to project management" and hurts efficiency. Fragmented tools lead to information silos and require constant context-switching, creating communication bottlenecks and making it hard to find one source of truth.
Top tools for IT project management
The right project management software can have a major impact on project execution and success. A good tool can streamline workflows, improve collaboration, and help manage projects from start to finish. Here are some powerful tools for your consideration.
Lark
Many IT teams rely on separate apps for planning, chatting, and task tracking, which can lead to project delays and confusion. Lark is designed to completely change how IT projects are managed. All essential tools are integrated on a single platform to help teams stay aligned, track progress, and move projects forward. With Lark, you can manage every part of a project from kick-off to execution in a single, connected workspace, so your team always knows what’s next. You can also use whatever project management methodology you prefer, and even switch if needed.
AI is naturally integrated into Lark to help teams tackle the different types of IT projects. It can help resolve issues faster by using AI to route tickets and deliver instant answers before problems escalate. For example, it provides a smart ticket routing system by using AI to categorize and assign tickets to the right team. It can also act as an IT helpdesk assistant, with an AI bot that handles routine issues and FAQs, reducing your team’s workload. In meetings, AI automatically generates summaries that capture the key points and action items.
No-code is needed to achieve all of this either, which is also great for digital transformation projects. This means you can build lightweight apps, create forms, and design dashboards to manage internal IT processes without developers.
Approval workflows can be created with ease to manage all your IT team's needs, from data access requests to software updates, which can be critical for cloud migration and cybersecurity projects. The platform can connect with HR and finance tools, which helps to automate processes and reduce duplicate data entry. IT teams can also stay ahead of risks by building dashboards that surface resource gaps, budget concerns, and delays in real time, with alerts that are sent the moment risks appear.
Jira
Image source: atlassian.com
The agile powerhouse for software development. Jira is a robust project management tool designed specifically for agile software development. It provides a comprehensive suite of features for bug tracking, sprint planning, and managing agile projects from one tool.
Jira offers fully customizable Scrum and Kanban boards, lets teams track progress against a project roadmap, and helps create custom workflows. Its strength is its ability to support and scale agile management methodologies for a variety of software development project plan needs, with features for sprint planning, backlog grooming, and time tracking with color indication.
Asana
Image source: asana.com
Flexible task management and project visualization. Asana is a popular project management software known for its clean, simple user interface and versatile capabilities. It's a good fit for teams that need detailed project planning and a variety of ways to view their work. Asana’s features include task dependencies, a Gantt-style timeline view for scheduling, custom fields for uniform data capture, and workflow automations.
The platform can organize work into lists or Kanban boards and even provides forms to capture the right details for work requests. It is especially useful for managing complex projects with multiple dependencies and offers a wide range of integrations, including a powerful one with Microsoft Teams that allows users to create, assign, and view tasks right from a Teams meeting.
Monday.com
Image source: monday.com
Visual, customizable, and user-friendly. Monday.com is a platform valued for its highly visual organization and ease of use, making it ideal for teams that want to get started quickly. It excels at workflow automation and provides a variety of customizable templates that can be adapted to almost any workflow. The platform's visual and intuitive interface often justifies its cost for teams that prioritize simplicity and customization.
Wrike
Image source: wrike.com
Built for complex, large-scale projects. Wrike is an all-in-one project management software built to handle the demands of both small teams and large enterprises. It works well for managing complex, multi-phase projects across departments, offering a centralized dashboard to monitor project statuses and objectives across an entire portfolio. Wrike also features AI-powered tools for drafting and summarizing content, which can help teams streamline various projects.
Final thoughts
Managing IT projects demands a structured plan, proactive risk management, and a focus on effective communication. The wide variety of tools available today reflects the complexity of this field, with a clear trend emerging toward integrated, all-in-one platforms.
While tools like Jira and Asana are powerful in their specific areas, modern IT project managers often seek a more unified ecosystem. Fragmented tools lead to wasted time and administrative burden, making it hard for teams to focus on the work itself.
The evolution of these tools shows a natural shift in the market toward platforms that prioritize a single user experience. Lark provides a unified, integrated ecosystem that lets a project team focus on the work, positioning it as a leader in a new generation of IT project management tools that support streamlined, end-to-end workflows.
FAQs
What is IT project management?
IT project management is the practice of applying standard project management methods to the world of information technology. This involves planning, executing, and overseeing technical projects like creating new software or upgrading systems. The main goal is to ensure these projects are completed on time and on budget, while aligning with a business's overall objectives.
How do you manage an IT project?
An IT project is typically managed by moving through a structured series of five phases: initiation, planning, execution, monitoring, and closing. Project managers can use different approaches, such as the traditional step-by-step method for a rigid timeline, or a more flexible, cyclical approach like Agile for projects that may change. Key practices include clearly defining the project's scope, being proactive about managing risks, and keeping everyone on the team and all key people informed.
What is an example of an IT project?
There are many types of IT projects. Some common examples include:
Creating a new software application.
Upgrading an organization's network and servers.
Moving a company's data and applications to a cloud-based system.
Implementing new cybersecurity measures, such as firewalls or data encryption.
