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…
Article: EPM and tools for everyone There are so many tools that can be applied to the project management paradigm that you’ve probably got several on your desktop right now that you’ve never considered. We’ll take a look at a few options in this article.