With money flooding into the economy and huge incentives to get the economy back underway, governments at federal, state and municipal levels are looking for innovative ways to get projects underway. One of the best already-established paths is the “Public-Private Partnership (PPP). That’s not to be confused with the other popular PPP acronym at the moment for the US Payroll Protection Plan. What is a PPP? A public-private partnership is a project which is a…
Is it harder to deploy an enterprise system when you aren’t co-located? Of course. But, it is much more common than you might think. If we think of deploying a system to a small business where everyone is in the same building, then communicating and encouraging use of the new system is easy to imagine. As the new system is designed and configured, the people doing that work are walking along the same corridor as…
In the EPM industry we tend to talk about Enterprise without much consideration that it may be considered differently by different people or at different times. Many people think of an enterprise as something that applies only to large multi-national publicly traded companies. Others might think of an enterprise as a broad collection of organizations or companies. This is one of the first questions I ask when speaking to an organization who is interested in…
Several years ago I worked directly the Microsoft Project Team as part of their Enterprise Project Management Partner Advisory Council. One topic that came up more than once during the 5 years I spent with the group was the impact of Excel on Project Management. At the time Microsoft estimated that over 30 million copies of Microsoft Project were in use somewhere around the world. Their own internal estimates were that over double that used…
My staff have heard me use the expression all too often. “Tail wags dog! Film at 11.” As though it were a breaking news headline on CNN. I use the expression though to talk about organizations that approach our company with an interest in deploying our enterprise timesheet system or an enterprise project management system but have somehow gotten the cart ahead of the horse (Yes, I know. It’s another expression). The conversation usually starts…
We’ve just published a new free webinar based on seminars that have been given many times in different venues around North America. Panning for Gold by Data Mining your Project Tracking data is approximately 60 minutes long and covers how to data mine enteprise project and enterprise timesheet data to improve efficiency. The webinar includes real life examples from some of our HMS Software clients in how they were able to data mine their project timesheet…
We get calls at our office reasonably often that start like this: “We need a project management system,” the caller asks. “What kind of project management system do you need?” we reply. “You know,” the caller says somewhat frustrated at our questions, “the kind of system that manages projects.” There are, of course many different kinds of project management systems. Given that we spend so much of our life at HMS in the enterprise timesheet…
I’m often asked to help organizations define their charge code structure, either for their project management system or their timesheet system. While it’s true that every organization is different and different needs result in different types of charges, there are some common practices we’ve found over the years that are universal. Ask less, not more No one likes bureaucracy, so the more complex a charge code structure you make, the less likely it will be…
Years ago I wrote an article about how project management required tracking not just planning. It was a time when many organizations used the terms project management and project planning synonymously. In fact many of what we referred to at the time as project management software systems were, in fact Critical Path Methodology calculators which were all about the planned schedule and very little about the actual progress. It’s almost 15 years later but it…