Economy of IT project - traditional vs agile approach

The diploma thesis evaluates various approaches to cost and benefit estimation for IT projects. The aim is to compare these approaches for traditionally and agile-driven projects and apply them to a specific project. In the first part of the thesis, the reader is acquainted with both types of approaches dealing with project management and the most used methodologies are explained in detail in individual chapters. The following chapters are devoted to IT costs, benefits and return on investment. Valuing the benefits of an investment is very difficult because soft metrics cannot be easily quantified. This problem is solved by qualitative methods such as Cost/Benefit analysis taking into account the benefits of non-financial aspects such as customer satisfaction, improvement of processes in the company or a better working environment. Furthermore, the thesis describes the financial methods used to evaluate the return on investment on the basis of which the decision on the implementation of the IT investment is made. In the practical part, the key methods for cost estimation and benefit valuation are applied to both styles of project management on a specific project. The benefit of this diploma thesis is mainly to show the different financial procedures used in IT projects, which can serve as a source of information for the realization of IT investments.