Anyone who has worked with project management systems knows that the way you display data can dramatically affect the decions people make from it. This is why we often see GANTT charts with critical activities in red. I’m reminded of one of my very first sales of project scheduling software back in the 80’s. I don’t dare share the name of the organization but it was a large utility. We’d made this sale a few…
If you’re implementing an enteprise project management system, then making sure you have someone who will champion the cause is critical. It’s not enough to have a good solution, you have to be able to sell it at all levels of the company and that takes someone who believes in the solution and won’t stop until it’s fully deployed.
There are so many display formats to choose from that it’s sometimes confusing to select the right one. Yet choosing the right display for the right kind of data makes all the difference to how it’s interpreted. Putting the right project view in the right hands can change the way decisions are made.
Big organizations often take on big epm deployments. It’s an easy mistake to make. Just because an organization is large, doesn’t mean that the deployment of an enterprise project management system needs to scale up to match it. Too many organizations think too big when they get started on an epm deployment and bite off more than they can chew.
There seems to be some management desire for real time project management systems where management would be able to get a minute-by-minute account of what’s happening with projects. But is this practical in a project management environment?
It’s a question that we would have thought would get settled years ago. When looking for EPM (Enterprise Project Management) software, should you be looking for the all-in-one or looking for the best of each type of tool that will link together?
EPM Vendors love to target the big enterprise. In some cases, so much attention is put on the hundreds of largest companies in the world that the hundreds of thousands of mid-market companies are ignored. This article takes a look at what kinds of tools and systems haven’t left the mid-market organization behind.
One of the grand debates in enterprise systems is whether you should be looking for one all-in-one tool or whether it’s better to look for the “best-of-breed” in each type of tool that you need. Can’t you do both? Use the all-in-one when it’s appropriate and the best-of-breed when the functionality outweighs the value of integration?
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.
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…