“So, what were you trying to accomplish here?” It’s a common question that I’ve had to ask of many project management office managers. Because of my background in enterprise project management systems, this mostly happens in response to some request to review a problem with a project management system implementation. Over the years I’ve been called upon to try to fix, repair, re-establish or just replace a failed or problematic project management system and my…
So, it’s time to bring it all together. You’ve used your talents thus far to choose the perfect project management software system; to implement it perfectly within your organization and to train your personnel within an inch of their lives. Now, it’s time to fulfill on some of those promises you made to management when they approved the budget in the first place and to integrate the project management system with other systems in the…
Managing projects is all about risk. If there were no risk, we’d have no need of project managers. When we think about risk though, what kinds of systems can help with collecting, tracking and analyzing risk? Let’s take a look.
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.
We hear often about the solution-sell; making sure that the project management software vendor is committed to deliver a complete solution not just a list of features. If true, that’s a great thing but where is the buyer’s responsibilty in the purchasing process? Here’s a thought on being a “solution buyer”.
There’s lots of talk lately about the project management maturity model but this principle can also be applied to project management systems and software. This article looks at how an organization’s use of project management systems matures over time and how it follows a common pattern in most organizations.
I’ve been in a lot of corporate meetings lately discussing various aspects of delivering an “integrated” project management environment. Don’t get me wrong, a corporate-wide integrated system is a wonderful thing to desire. There’s no doubt that the idea of pushing a button on a screen and finding that every element of data across the company is tied to every other element in just such a way that the answers I desire are immediately available…
Commercial tools are not the only ones available for managing projects but do you have all the facts when you choose an open source tool for project management? Both commerical and open source tools may be a part of your pm environment but make sure you understand the total cost of ownership either way.