APPLYING CREATIVE PROJECT MANAGEMENT – A STUDY OF ICT PROJECTS IN HUMANITIES FACULTY IN SOUTH AFRICA

The dawn of the new era where Humanities meet with technology face-to-face has reached a diverse faculty in a developing country. In a globally competitive market, educational institutions are constantly under pressure to keep up with the changing teaching environments that are increasingly deploying technology. In the last decade the Humanities faculty at the University of Cape Town (UCT) has transformed teaching platforms in most discipline specific areas to accommodate these changing needs. The technological changes led to huge capital investments and unforeseen financial spend, while also unveiling a world of possibilities for various departments leading to increased Information and Communications Technology (ICT) deployment projects to enhance teaching. This has led to the ICT unit within the faculty to research on best project management practices that will allow creative establishment of unique technological spaces for teaching and research for specific fields in the faculty. The challenge being to create highly specialised spaces within the time constraints, allocated budgets and human resources. This involved capitalising on expert knowledge in the fields of study and IT experts knowledge and possibilities within the University’s IT infrastructure and policies. There had to be efforts toward “Re-thinking project management” in order to conceptualise project management in this space and suggest good practice. The paper essentially outlines the potential contribution Eddie Obeng’s framework can have on creative IT project management, project phenomena and highlights project leadership principles. This paper achieves this by using images of projects which seek to encourage a more pragmatic and reflective approach on projects, based on deliberately seeing projects from multiple perspectives, exploring the insights and implications which flow from these, and crafting appropriate action strategies in complex situations. This paper demonstrates the practical use of these frameworks in Humanities ICT projects that integrate technology and teaching and how the differentiation of project types plays a crucial role in determining requirements specification and furthermore impacts the duration and quality of the needs analysis phase.