The best project? That's easy. It's the one that finished on point, on time and on budget. The one that didn't boil the ocean, but instead pushed business units to work more collaboratively, creating a product that tangibly improved business processes and staff productivity, and measurably returned your investment in it.

For your large financial services company, that best project was the decidedly unsexy rollout of a Web-based application that extended the life of a still-mission-critical legacy mainframe. By working closely with the system's business users—

analysts, the accounting department and customer service, among others—your I.T. and development teams planned, built, tested and brought live a Java application that layers over the mainframe, extending users' access to Old Faithful with a faster, more robust interface. The new system also paves the way for a phase 2 project that will nimbly migrate the legacy data into a modern, less-proprietary enterprise environment that ultimately will allow the mainframe to fade into quiet retirement—on your terms, instead of one business-crippling Thursday at 2 in the morning.

The project's six-month time line and sub-$1 million cost were one-third the numbers you had entertained for an epic next-generation setup. Five years ago, you probably would have invested heavily to create that Big New Data System. But what's changed in those five years is also what has brought the biggest change to the project management landscape: the absolute cost-justification and process-certainty demanded of every project in today's business climate.

The way your company has driven that change on development projects big and small is to embrace the Unified Process, a software development methodology that emphasizes an iterative, test-as-you-go approach (see chart at right). The UP's integrated development phases and continual evaluation of each project's pieces, processes and goals has found a growing following in this era of bottom-line I.T. investment.

"The dot-bomb era was a wake-up call for a lot of companies on how they handled development projects," says Dave Locke, a product director at Rational Software, part of the IBM Software Group. "People are much more aware today that development is a core business process that they have to keep a handle on."

To see the details behind this Project Planner and fill in your own estimates, click on the "Get the Tool" icon above and download the interactive worksheet.