Many boards are aware of the need for more guidance in the area of IT governance (Young and Jordan 2002). This is partly as a result of Sarbanes-Oxley and other international legislative responses to the spate of recent high profile corporate collapses (e.g. Enron, WorldCom, HIH, One-Tel, etc). It is also a reflection of a genuine desire of boards to improve their performance (Leblanc and Gillies 2005).

A number of good guidelines have been developed. These include a recent publication by CPA Australia (Gillies and Broadbent 2005), COBIT produced by the Information Systems Audit and Control Association COBIT 2000) and AS8015 produced by Standards Australia (AS8015 2005). However these guidelines are at focussed on IT governance as a whole and do not elaborate in any detail on how to govern IT projects. This distinction is important because 74 per cent of projects are undertaken as business improvement initiatives enabled by ICT (KPMG 2005) and belong more properly in the domain of corporate governance rather than being pure ICT projects within the domain of IT governance alone.

The objective of this chapter is to complete the picture by extending the IT Governance guidelines to describe how projects need to be governed at a board and senior management level. It summarises the findings of four years of research undertaken collaboratively with Standards Australia. This research has resulted in the award of a PhD thesis (Young 2005) and the findings are being published by Standards Australia as HB280, a handbook with the same title as this chapter.