SPM implementations are very complex projects that involve stakeholders from multiple areas typically IT, Sales, Finance, and HR. Early in the project these stakeholders need to sit down and come to a common vision of how the technology will be used to support the compensation management program along will help define how the leadership of the project changes over time. Other key considerations in determining leadership include - Does the organization have a dedicated PMO, testing, or training team? Will the technology be deployed on-premise or at a vendor site (SaaS, Cloud, Hosted, On-Demand).
A common example we see following a traditional waterfall methodology will have IT leading the project for the Requirements, Design and Build Phase and part of the way through Testing. Once system testing is over, the business should generally assume leadership of the project to run User Acceptance Testing and deployment to the administration team and the field. For Agile methodologies we see the leadership shift more strongly to IT throughout the course of the project.
From a pure Project Management perspective IT generally has the experience in running projects and usually IT will have to tackle the most technically difficult part of the project - the upstream data. If the project is going to be deployed on-premise then many IT project tasks will be on the critical path - Hardware, software installation, logical and physical DB, security, etc. If the project is being deployed in a SaaS environment then IT still has to be responsible as the Data Provider but it's very feasible for this type of project to be led from the business side.
In summary, for Sales Performance Management projects, I don't believe this to be a simple "A or B" answer but leadership for a SPM project should be defined by each organization to match their strategic goals with resources (both internal and external) and capabilities.
What types of leadership structures have others seen be successful for a SPM project?
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