Over the years, one of the most challenging changes to the success of project management software has been the lack of training and training materials that are included in any deployment. I wrote about this time ago in an article entitled “Batteries not included”. Organizations used to allocate a portion of their implementation budget to training and, as the price of project management software has dropped to a fraction of it used to cost in…
I was asked lately how to find the great reports and dashboards that Microsoft shows in its sales demonstrations. Happily, Microsoft makes those example files available online for anyone who has Project Server 2007. The reports are based on Microsoft SQL Reporting Services which has a wide range of reporting functionality. You could, for example, create reports which are scheduled to leave the report file in a particular area and then automatically send an email…
There are two big methods to deploying enterprise software. The most popular and espoused by the big-box consulting firms we can term the “Big Bang” approach. We make a complete design, take 2 years to deploy but when it finally comes out it’s hopefully everything you ever hoped for. The other way to go is the “Phased” approach. Here we get an approach that may take longer to get to the complete solution and may even never get there but it carries the advantage of paying dividends along the way and being adjustable to change direction if the company changes over time. Which one’s better? Take a read of this article to find out.
With major ERP vendors like SAP and Oracle directing new efforts from the enterprise market to the mid-market and vendors like Microsoft directing new efforts from the end-user to the mid-market, there is bound to be some interesting competition underway. We can think of an ERP system as the unmoveable object but the wave of user support for Microsoft is not to be taken lightly. We can think of them as the unstoppable force. Both are headed to the same place. How does this affect the Enterprise Project Management market? This article tackles this subject.
Should you look for an all-in-one business management tool that does accounting, human resource management and project management or should you be looking for best-in-breed tools that can integrate with each other? This article looks at how software vendors are trying to extend their markets; Downward from the ERP vendors who look to move from the central Finance department out to other departments and; Upward from the desktop project tools towards the centralized management sections of the company.
People who look at project management systems rarely distinguish between the driving force behind such systems. Virtually all project scheduling systems are analytic in nature. They’re about estimates and projections. Yet data that looks very similar in Outlook or whatever you use for an agenda isn’t analytic at all, it’s commitment based. This article distinguishes between these different paradigms nd points out the trouble that can happen when the domains are muddled.
It’s not enough to have a list of great features in a project management system in order to be successful. You’ve also got to have a system that can reach the people involved in the project management process. That’s more than knowing it has a web interface. Project mManagement these days is all about communication and if your system can’t reach more than the professional schedulers and be relevant to the day-to-day business of the people on the project team that it does reach then there’s little hope of the system becoming an “Enterprise” project management system. This article looks at what it takes to be an enterprise-level project system.
Article: Batteries not included When people used to buy large-scale project management systems, buying the training was just part of the cost of doing business. The cost of training compared to the cost of the software was a fraction. You might spend only 10% of your software investment on training of your personnel on the proper use of the project managemnet system. As project system have become cheaper the percentage people expect to pay on…
Systems: Microsoft Project Microsoft has released a “December 2007 Cumulative Update notice”. The notice includes update information on Microsoft Office Project 2007, Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 and other elements of the techology “stack” on which Project and Project Server depend. You can find the details at the bottom of the Microsoft Project Update Page here on EPM Guidance. Read more…
Systems: Microsoft Project Server 2007 updates Microsoft Project Server 2007 has had a range of updates, service packs and patches. There’s not a simple list of these updates on the Microsoft web site so we’ve made a cheat sheet list for you to get to them quickly. Read more…