Everything old it seems is new again. One of the earliest programmatic approaches to project scheduling was invented in the heyday of the Cold War. Propelled by inter service rivalries on one side and by the threat of Soviets in the arms race on the other, PERT was born. The Program Evaluation & Review Technique looked beyond a simple Critical Path Methodology (CPM) analysis to introduce the notion of risk into the project schedule. The method was tremendously successful. It was used on the Polaris missile project in the late 50s and early 60s and was credited with enabling the first test launch only 18 months after the start of the project.

The PERT method asks the scheduler to provide three data points for each activity rather than one. Each activity has a best-guess duration but also an optimistic and pessimistic duration as well. The idea is to start by doing the schedule based on only the optimistic, then only the best guess and then finally only the pessimistic durations. As the project progresses and actuals replace the optimistic, best guess and pessimistic durations, the range of risk at project completion decreases.

Why should this matter? Well, if you’re looking at the schedule for any significant-sized project and the result of that schedule says something like “We’ll be done with this project in 2 years, 3 months 6 days and 4 hours, everyone knows that’s a lie. The more likely scenario is that you will be able to estimate within a couple of months yet that’s not how we talk about the schedule. It we had followed the PERT method, we’d have gotten the easiest schedule range from just adding up the optimistic, pessimistic and best guess durations to be able to add “Our most optimistic projection is 2 years and 12 days and our most pessimistic projection is 3 years, 6 months and 4 days”

A range like that may not be what management wants to hear. We know what the reaction from management is likely to be: “You will finish the schedule then based on the most optimistic projection!” But, if you introduce this kind of analysis into every schedule, then you reveal several things straight away. First of all, is the scheduler an optimist (like the one above) or a pessimist? This isn’t trivial. It’s a terribly important thing to know. Also important is the increased credibility of giving a range of dates. It says to the reader that you’ve considered things that could happen to this project (both good and bad) and have given your best possible answer.

For those who spend time in such an analysis, it is also interesting to keep track of the progression of the range. Think about it like this. The day before the last day of the project, the range of possible finish dates is probably very narrow. “We’ll finish tomorrow or maybe the next day,” you might say. On the first day of the project, you would expect the widest range because we have the most number of tasks, which still have optimistic and pessimistic numbers that we’re considering. It’s logical then to expect that the two endpoints (the optimistic and pessimistic) will migrate towards each other as the project progresses. That indicates a healthy advance.

If the endpoints start to move apart during the project, this indicates that we’ve introduced an element of risk into the project that wasn’t there when we started. The endpoints can only move apart when we either add tasks or re-assess the optimistic and pessimistic durations of the remaining work. That’s an easy-to-watch-for warning sign for management that should spark some kind of project review.

We seem to have come a long way since the Polaris missile project but, while PERT did find its fans, it never took off the way that we talk about CPM analysis. Only those esoteric schedulers in the Risk Analysis industry seemed to take any notice and they were working on other things. If you’re interested in schedule and budget risk then you’re probably talking more about statistics that come out of a Monte Carlo analysis, or something much more involved. (“What’s Monte Carlo analysis?” you ask. That’s a subject for another day but suffice to say that the result of such analyses are S-Curves, Bell Curves and probability statistics.)

We still see PERT analysis available in a wide range of project scheduling tools. Some vendors probably wonder why they’re still supporting something that hasn’t got a huge following.

PERT suffered in its popularity not because it was a bad technique (I think it’s a great technique) but because it takes more work. Remember, we’re talking about adding additional elements of data for every single task during the planning process. In some organizations it’s hard enough to get a single data point, never mind three. So given there was more work and no incentive for most project managers to implement the technique, it gradually fell from favour.

So? It’s ancient history right?

Wrong.

While enjoying a quick four-day visit to Sydney, Australia (I’m kidding of course, while I do love Australia, it’s impossible to fly the 26 hours there and the 26 hours back and enjoy only four days in between), I got to meet with and listen to some of the top project managers in the Defence Industry. I took great interest in the sessions on Risk Management, as it’s something I know something about and it’s not often talked about in those terms.

In Australia, defence projects (and other major capital projects) must comply with the AS4360 standard. This standard was first introduced down under in 1995 and thanks in part, I think, to a red-hot economy and a government committed to expanding its defence spending, the AS4360 standard took hold in a big way and has become a staple of large projects there. That might have been the end of this story except that the standard has done so well that there  has been a resurgence of interest in project risk management in the US for major capital projects. Those in the know say that the AS4360 promotes a “risk analysis lite” culture that is quite acceptable to the Defence, Aerospace and Energy projects that should be implementing such techniques.

In particular, one of the components of this newfound interest in risk management is the notion of three-point estimates for schedules, and that is PERT.

If you’ve never done PERT analysis before, it’s almost certainly available to you.  Try it with any copy of Microsoft Project up until version 2007. (The functionality is unfortunately no longer available in Project as of 2010)  Right click on your menu bar to reveal the PERT toolbar. It will show you how to enter your optimistic and pessimistic analyses and show you a view with the result of your three-point analysis. It’s a worthwhile exercise if you’ve not tried it before and, if you do, you’ll be ahead of the pack and have a taste of project management life from Down-Under.

G’day mate!

One of the first things I need to do whenever I go into a company to talk about Enterprise Project Management (EPM) is to get some kind of a consensus of what it means.

I can hear some of you laughing.

“Surely after all this time,” you’re saying, “we have a common understanding of such a basic term in the project management industry.”

No, I’m afraid not. It’s perhaps remarkable in an age when we talk often about Project Management Maturity Models but a common understanding of EPM is not only not that common but there is a huge range of possible interpretations.

EPM for some means everyone storing their data on projects into a common repository. For others, it means grouping projects together which share some common element, perhaps a resource pool or inter-project dependencies. For some, EPM means working on projects at a portfolio level. Still others might mean tracking actuals in a single timesheet. There are people who say that it’s not really enterprise project management unless you’re doing resource capacity planning and there are people who say it’s not “enterprise” unless it’s integrated directly to the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.

That’s already a lot of possible directions to go and yet there’s more. The sheer size of what someone might mean by “the enterprise” is also critical. In the last month, I’ve been in organizations which thought of an enterprise as being a division of 50 people, a complete company of 400 people, a division of more than 1000 people and a department of about 10 people.

So, all of that to say that there are a lot of definitions of what Enterprise is and what Project Management is and what Enterprise Project Management is.

So, let’s transpose our definition conundrum to selecting tools. There are many vendors in the project management industry who promote their “enterprise project management systems”. This can present a challenge to those trying to find a tool to help their project organization to become more effective.

Microsoft is an excellent case in point. With the release of Office 2007, we see of course, the release of the new version of Microsoft Project. There are now 6 products to purchase from the Project department of Microsoft. Project Standard, the trusty veteran has been with us now since the early 90s. Project Professional 2007 is the big brother of Standard designed to link to Project Server. Project Server of course is now in its third iteration and its associated Project Web Access. There is also Project Portfolio Server 2006 for Project Portfolio Management and the associated Project Portfolio Client Access License. I’ve seen organizations which use Project Standard as a solution for their enterprise requirements so, while it is designed as an individual efficiency tool, it’s certainly possible to work with it either alone or in concert with other tools to make an entire organization more effective. Project Server of course, is what we’ve heard most of from Microsoft in the last 4 years for organizational solution needs.

Yet, there are a couple of elements that Microsoft has also released recently that are fascinating possible solutions.

Inside of the new version of Microsoft Office SharePoint, a product which is provided at no additional cost as part of Windows, Microsoft has included “Lightweight Projects”. This template allows an organization to create simple GANTT charts complete with dependencies, resources, Critical Path analysis, and a bar chart view. The module was actually created by the Microsoft Project development team for the SharePoint group. Lightweight projects can be promoted to Project Server 2007 at any time should you need to put them into a more complete structure with more depth and options but for some groups, this will be an interesting feature to look into.

Of course there are already organizations which have used SharePoint’s other features to track project documents, issues, risks, to-do lists and more. For them, this may be enterprise project management. Here at HMS we’ve assisted organizations with creating enterprise management systems for tracking key project data using only SharePoint.

The most popular project management system in the world (yes, I’m talking about Excel) has also been enhanced with Office 2007. In particular a server component for Excel which is part of the Office System 2007 is something that project management Excel aficionados should look into. The server component allows the massive Excel farms that have been so problematic to support to become centralized enterprise-like components. Where once we would have thought of Excel only as an individual productivity tool, that thinking is due for some revision with this new version.

Microsoft also has tools for project management that are part of its Dynamics line if you think of project management as an accounting or cost-based conversation. And, if you’re in an IT environment doing development, then the new Visual Studio Team Services system is a centralized enterprise-level system which includes scheduling and resource allocation.

But, by far my favourite of the new products in the Microsoft camp is Groove. Groove was one of Microsoft’s acquisitions this year. Whether you’re talking about Groove Server or the Groove client, the Groove Project Space is a fascinating way to collaborate with a team. Documents, lists, assignments and more can be assembled in the Groove space which can interact with SharePoint, with the Groove Server or even peer to peer.

I’ve talked only about Microsoft so far but there are offerings from numerous other vendors for systems that are worth consideration including Primavera, eProject and others. So, which of these various tools are the best? Just as I’ve often said in these pages, there’s no way to answer the question. If you’re looking for a solution, you’ve got to first identify the problem. For any organization which identifies business challenges at the enterprise level that require an enterprise project management solution, the first step is to identify exactly what that business challenge is.

When we consult a client on EPM, we go through a simple yet powerful process with the management of the organization early on in the deployment. We start by having senior management identify key business decisions that they either can’t make now or can make only with great difficulty that they believe would be made easier through the deployment of an EPM system. The exercise is virtually always fascinating. Once we’ve identified as many possible such business challenges we trace what would be required to deliver information to management in order to make that business decision easier. Then we sort the requirements based on those which are possible to deliver based on data that is already available to us and those which will deliver the biggest impact on the organization.

There are a couple of instant benefits to this process. First participants in the meetings are almost always surprised to find out that the perspectives of others in the meeting don’t match their own. Just finding out that others in the organization are not looking at the same metrics or trying to manage the same business challenges is usually eye-opening for everyone in the process. Second, we are able to focus on what aspects of an EPM system should be deployed in order to deliver the fastest return on investment. I have never done this exercise where I have not been surprised by at least some aspect of what was revealed.

There is a plethora of enterprise project management tools on the market and if you’re thinking that implementing one of them will result in making your organization more effective, then start your search in house. Start with identifying what aspects of your business will benefit from what type of system and the selection of which category of EPM tool to search for will become infinitely easier.

Project Management systems – it’s about deployment. Sure, there are lots of functions to consider and everyone wants to know your “methodology” but if you are committed to having projects fit into a an organizational system, it all comes down to deployment. Can you assemble a system that will actually be accepted and used by the end-users who will have to use it. Deployment includes all of it: developing the concept, buying or writing the system, installing it and configuring it of course and, most importantly, getting acceptance from the end users who must populate it with accurate and appropriate data.

Over the next few issues of PM Times we’ll be looking at how to deploy a project management system. We can’t of course, give you a complete course in the few paragraphs we have here. That would take a book. We can however, raise some of the key issues and give you some food for thought in dealing with whatever your current project management system environment is today. Whether you’ve got a well established project management system or if you’re just getting started, looking at how your system should be deployed is key to its success.

In this issue we’ll look at establishing requirements for a project control system. In the next issue we’ll cover creating the deployment plan. The next issue will cover training and finally we’ll look at integrating your pm system with other elements of your enterprise.

Requirements of a project management system
It used to be hard enough to set the requirements for a pm system for the organization. Internal experts and sometimes external consultants would congregate and, after extensive interviews with staff and management would go to the market to see what might be available. From the myriad dozens of potential products, the selection team would make a short list and vendors would troop in to display their wares. With luck, the selected system would meet most of the “must-have” requirements and would also squeeze into the budget.

The pace of change in today’s world makes one nostalgic for those simpler, kinder days. Imagine that five years ago there were perhaps 4,000 organizations who had ever heard of the World Wide Web. Now, some 4,000 new domain sites are registered every day. Two years ago, Java was something you had with your donut in the morning. Now, it is on the must-have list of every project management systems requirement.

What hope is there of setting appropriate requirements for a project management system your organization when technology upon which those requirements must rest is changing faster than you can even complete your analysis.

Well, it’s not as bad as you might fear. First of all, forget for a moment about technology. Your search should focus instead on who needs access to the system and, once they get it, what they’ll want to do. The great thing about the proliferation of Microsoft Project is that it has given us a good benchmark to use in describing functionality to end-users. A little thought about your own project management process here, at the beginning of your implementation will be the highest leveraged effort of the entire exercise.

Work on some of these questions:

• Who has access to the raw data to create new projects and to update existing ones? Should they have direct access to the project management system? What benefits would they gain from direct access? What benefits would the organization gain?
• What is the project management skill level of the projected users
• Who receives now and who will receive the output of the project management system? What reports will they need? How will having that report or data make them more effective? Is there an actual purpose to the reports they are receiving now?
• What lack of project-oriented information or analysis is hurting the organization? What impact would the availability of this information have?
• Who will champion the project management system? What is their authority? Who at the most senior level of the organization is sponsoring the initiative? What are their expectations? Are they achievable?
• Are there external influences in the implementation of this system (e.g. contract requirements)? What are they?
• What other systems will the pm system need to integrate with? Are these systems open enough to integrate? Will the system need to depend on third-party interfaces?

Once you’ve answered some of these questions you can start looking at some of the key building blocks in creating a project management system which will be acceptable to multiple users across your organization. Concentrate on some of the following factors while looking for potential vendors of expertise and systems:

• Suitability to purpose. Ask the vendor what experience they’ve had with your type of industry. Get references and (don’t forget!) call them!
• Flexibility, flexibility and (did I mention this?) flexibility. An “open-architecture” system will be one which can be easily enhanced and upgraded and modified from one use to another. This is key when technology may change faster than your projections.
• Multiple levels of interface for multiple types of user. Sorry, one size does not fit all. Many enterprise-wide vendors will have flexible interfaces or multiple products.
• Open data architecture. “If you can get at the data, you can do anything.” is a bit of an overstatement but key to interfacing with other systems.
• Keeping your options open is key to success in the deployment of a project management system. Until the next issue when we look at your deployment plan, I’ll leave you with this thought from Napoleon Bonaparte: “A battle plan lasts until contact with the enemy.”

In our last issue I talked about determining your requirements for a corporate project management system. This month we’ll talk about creating your plan for the deployment of your project management system.

What?! You don’t have a plan? Well, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is, you’re not alone, many project managers have attempted to deploy their project management system without a plan. The bad news? You’re not alone, many project managers attempt to deploy a project management system without a plan! I think it’s the ‘shoemaker whose children are barefoot’ syndrome. We tend to apply our skills last to our own projects.

The first step in making for a successful deployment of your project management system is in looking at the exercise as a project with everything that entails. Does this project have a sponsor? Who is the client? What is the schedule? What are the conditions for success? Here are a few elements you should be looking at when you are planning out the deployment of your new project management system:

Management Support
First of all, does this plan have management support. Problems with deploying project management software suffer most often from a lack of a product champion in the executive suite. Sometimes, decisions about implementing pm software come from management as a reaction to some problem (either real or perceived) about a particular project or projects in general. This might look like executive support but the support is very short term. Does management understand the scope and duration of the plan or are they hoping for an overnight fix? (You know what I mean – “As soon as that new software’s here, all our projects will be back on schedule”)

Look for management support that will last long term – It may be a year or two before the final effects of this implementation are felt. Is your project champion ready for the usual backlash that comes with a change in culture?

Also, what about funding. In this day of $300 project management software it’s easy to overlook the overall costs of implementing a change in a corporate system. Will you have the funding required for training? How about consultants to help tie your pm system to other legacy systems in the company? Has the I/T department set aside funds for technical support or people to help with the implementation?

Getting a product champion identified at the highest levels can be the most significant factor in overcoming the problem with all projects: Murphy’s Law.

Degree of deployment
While you’re assembling your plan, one of the most significant elements will be its scope. Implementation of a project management system if often thought of in one of only two camps: 1) Let every project manager do what they want or; 2) Choose a corporate-wide system and implement it everywhere. The problem of course with either plan is that few organizations benefit from them. The most common structure is one where some projects warrant a high-end project scheduling system, other projects warrant some kind of desktop planning system and yet other projects are so simple they warrant no project scheduling system at all. While you’re deciding who will and won’t be using your newfound package, think about what the payback will be for project managers at different levels. It is sometimes easier to leave small, low-risk projects out of the plan altogether. They’re numerous, they’re often very unique, very different from each other and the payback of having them in the central system is often very low.

Deciding on your level of penetration in the organization will be critical element of success. Pick your battles. If the small-project project managers want to do their own thing, it may be worth your while to get them off your list by letting them.

PM Process
Have you thought of where you’re going to gather the data for this new and improved software? Is the company ready to provide it or are you looking at cultural changes in the way they operate. One of our clients recently was working on implementing the corporate timekeeping system we publish. Management committed the company to move to a weekly time collection from the bi-monthly payroll-oriented collection they used to use in order to properly implement activity-based-costing. “No problem,” said management. Well, it has taken an enormous effort to get that message out to the rank and file who were so used to doing the work on the 1^st and the 15^th. Some resist doing the timesheet weekly despite the obvious advantages for the company. You need to look at what your new system requires and plan for it in advance.

Implementing a new package is also a perfect time for implementing process changes that may have been long-delayed. People will be changing anyway. You might as well take advantage to have them change to more productive ways of working.

Training
Can I say this enough: training, training, training. Not just in product functionality. Make sure you put aside enough funding and time to get people trained in the new way they’ll need to do business in order to support your new system. Make sure people know long in advance how much time will be required for users to come up to speed and make both an incentive to get trained and a penalty for avoiding it. It doesn’t matter if you spend $300, $30,000 or $3,000,000 on your new system; either get your people trained or plan to use the new CD for a coffee coaster.

Legacy Data
It’s a category that too many people forget. Unless you’re a start-up, you’ve got projects in progress. What will you do with all the legacy data from you existing system? That system may have been automated, may have been database-based, it may have been manual. You’ve still got to consider the value of the data in that system (or systems) and arrange the resources required to get it translated into the new system. Data conversions are often a tricky business. Get your new software supplier to check on the data and give a firm-price bid on converting it. You may need to pay them a day or two of investigative time but the back-end savings will make it well worth it.

Legacy Systems
Finally, don’t be too quick to throw those legacy systems in the trash bin. If you’ve got projects in progress, it may be less disruptive for everyone to let some projects wind down with the software that is being used on it. Make sure you’re going to give the project manager some benefit by switching his in-progress project data from one system to another before you mandate the change. If you’re keeping those legacy systems for awhile (and many do) then make sure there’s a firm plan to retire them once they’ve fulfilled their function and make allowances for moving their data and training the personnel working on them at a later date.

Conclusion
All in all, deploying a project management system can be an exciting time as the new features and functions start to impact the way you do business. It’s an opportunity for an organization to become much more effective but it’s also not risk-free. Make sure you take the time to plan before you leap.

In our next issue, I’ll be looking at how to weave your way through the myriad categories of project-oriented software in order to choose the one that’s right for you.

It’s the hot button lately in project management circles. How can teams collaborate? It’s not idle chatter. It’s been apparent for a long time that a project manager’s role is not just calculating a schedule from his hidden laboratory deep in the bowels of the organization. Now a project manager is expected to spend the vast majority of his or her time working with others. They may be negotiating with the clients or recruiting new team members or empowering and encouraging the team to be more effective or referreeing resource conflicts with resource managers. And that’s just one-on-one or with small groups. The project manager is also expected to speak publicly to the board or the media or the users or the team.

With collaboration being such a hot button it’s not surprising that project management software publishers and consultants are happily explaining how wonderful it will be for clients to improve their collaboration tools. I get such requests on a regular basis.

So let’s pause a moment and just review what collaboration means and what implementing better collaboration entails. Dictionary.com has a couple of definitions of collaboration but the most useful to this discussion is: “To work together, especially in a joint intellectual effort.” Not too useful for practical purposes but the idea is having people work together. Well, a project almost always involves people working together so we know we’re off to a good start. What might team collaborators collaborate on?

A few categories of how teams might work together might include document management, meeting management, communications follow up or working with virtual teams. Let’s tackle a few of these:

Document Management

One of the most popular things pointed to when talking about collaboration benefits is document management. In many project environments, moving documents around numerous participants in the project team can be a critical success factor. In high tech, these might be design criteria. In engineering, they might be archtectural plans or engineering drawings. In bio-research they might be regulatory documents. It seems attractive to link these documents to task reports when doing project schedule reports but the big benefits of this kind of collaboration process is managing the workflow of the document. Should this be part of your project management process along with schedule management? There are a couple of factors to consider. First of all, does your organization already have a document management system. Many large organizations do. If so, then going with the flow on a system that’s already deployed makes a lot of sense. Secondly, does your entire project team have access to it? This may not be so obvious. Many project teams extend beyond a single organization. If that’s the case, then setting up a parallel document management system for documents associated to the project might be more sensible.

Meeting Management

Meetings, Meetings, Meetings. They’re so common that many timesheet systems automatically include a meeting entry. (We get asked for one all the time with our own TimeControl timesheet deployments.) Having meetings is often collaboration by definition but how you conduct those meetings can make a big difference to the effectiveness of a project. Meeting management systems include numerous features such as agenda management, minute taking, meeting collateral management (such as reports that are submitted to be viewed by the partiicpants), attendance recording and even virtual attendance for those who are out of town. With so many organizations having to curtail travel and even inter-office movement in order to save costs and with so many project teams reaching outside the organization, an effective meeting management process and system can make a world of difference. Sometimes such meetings can have an immediate impact on the project inlucing changing priorities, changing resource allocation, updating risks and progress information. Just being able to record promises made in a regular project review meeting and being able to recall that information instantly at the next meeting can revolutionize project progressing. But, does this mean that that the meeting management system should be integrated into the project scheduling system? Possibly. The first place to look is to see how the meeting management process is integrated into the project management process. Then look and see if there is an existing meeting management system and if that system is available to all your participants. It might be more important to have meeting management linked to document management than to scheduling.

Virtual Teams

More and more we’re seeing project teams being defined outside of the walls and even the corporate organization. Teams might include the client and sub contractors and even regulatory authorities from outside the organization and executive sponsors and resources from within the organization. The team may extend not just beyond the walls of the organization, it might also extend into numerous time zones and even numerous countries. Just holding a telephone conversation can be a significant challenge if part of the team is just getting to work in the morning as another part is just leaving at the end of their day half-way around the world. Empowering the virtual team to work as a team can be a significant challenge that has to be addressed early in the project lifecycle. Being able to distribute documents, record virtual meetings for review by others offline, updating progress in multiple time zones and even just being able to deposit project deliverables and artifacts somewhere in a file management system that is managed and traceable can make the difference between a project that works twice as effectively or half. I have seen such virtual teams hum along at a breakneck pace, one group half way around the world is delivering aspects of the project that is being reviewed by a team on the other side of the planet in time to be updated by the first group as they return in the morning. It can move so fast that it feels like around the clock development and that too can pose a challenge. When the pace of work is twice as fast as some team members are used to, the project can go off the rails in an awful hurry. Systems need to be twice as vigilant if the work is moving twice as fast so deploying systems to allow that tracking to be done more effectively is essential.

Incident and List management

There are so many bits of data that get generated during a project that having a single place to track them can allow many people to connect quickly and effectively. Lists and artifacts can be almost anything. They might include commissioning lists, deficiencies, bugs, corrective measures or even just lists of team members. Having such information readily available to all team members can be a blessing. I’ve seen a number of projects where integrating such list management into the project system and having that system be outward facing; meaning available through the Internet improves the speed of managing those lists and identifying problems that must be addressed by other team members. Simple online list management can level the playing field quickly by allowing required intervention to be recorded that reaches any member of the team at any level. A process needs to be in place to prevent every team member from assigning incidents indiscriminately to executives but the ability to do so can make a project tremendously more effective. These lists are rarely at the level of tasks that are managed in the schedule yet they often are able to affect tasks in the schedule.

Communication with… everyone

Effective communication is everything to a project manager but when setting up your project environment its worthwhile to try to determine what kind of communication is appropriate for what kind of information. Will you be checking your FAX every hour? Is that how you’d like to transmit documents? Do you want everyone copying everyone on every email? Will you progress data in a physical meeting or can members dial in virtually? Will you be updating information via SMS on a cell phone or on an application on a smartphone? How about instant messaging? Just because you can instant message someone on their phone will you use this as a primary source of communication? What information should require instant messaging and if you’re going to use this does everyone on the team have access to the same instant messaging system and network? Figuring out your communications strategy before you start your project makes a huge difference.

Collaboration is a way of life in today’s project management world. Most project managers and project management offices don’t need a do-everything project management system but hoping that collaboration will happen by default is a fantasy. A smart project manager will organize how they want collaboration to happen before the project starts even when systems are already in place. Getting everyone onto the same page early often makes the difference between staying ahead of the project or living in reaction mode trying to catch up until the project is done.

Executives often ask me for the impossible and what they want is best exemplified by an often used phrase, “A sip from the firehose.” In most organizations today there is no shortage of data and in the project and portfolio management realm in particular we have a plethora of systems and processes that can generate data but no manager can possibly sift through thousands or even millions of records in order to determine what decisions they should make.

The result is that most significant decisions about projects including the decision to start the project in the first place is made on an ad-hoc basis.

The technique to avoid this is well known. Organizations should choose “Key Performance Indicators” (KPIs )which will surface information that is critical to making those business decisions. But, how does one choose those KPIs? How do you know that the KPIs you’re using are producing the result you require? Let’s take a look.

Choosing KPIs

First of all, where do we look for choosing the right Key Performance Indicator and how will we measure it? These metrics will be used in a variety of ways. We can use these metrics for distinguishing one project from another. We can use them in the project selection process, the stage gate process, the resource priority allocation process and the project review process. There is no limit to the number of things we could measure.

One place to look it through the main elements of PMI’s PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge). In each section you might have possible measure that would lead to better management of the project.

In the Scope area, for example, you might have scope creep or scope change as a measure. In the Time area you might look at delays in the schedule. In the Cost area you might look at resource costs or Return on Investment. In the Communications area you might look at the timeliness of schedule updates or the status of project reporting. In the HR area you might look at Resource Variance or Resource Load/Overload or Resource balance. In the Risk area you might look at the volume of risk items and their severity or urgency and so on and so on.

Not every metric will make sense in every context. For example, in a private organization, projected Return on Investment might be a critical measure. In a public organization this might be completely inappropriate. There, citizen satisfaction or alignment with legislative requirements might be much more appropriate.

Some of the criteria for a good KPI would be this:

Ø The KPI reflects some element of corporate strategy

So, measuring ontime delivery might make sense in most organizations, but where corporate strategy is more focused on quality or safety, focusing on ontime delivery might result in management making decisions that are diametrically opposed to the corporate mission.

Ø The KPI is actionable

All too often we see organizations with spectacular dash boards containing lovely graphics and charts and, when we ask what action is supposed to happen if this indicator turns red or if the needle on that guage goes to the danger zone, no one knows the answer. The whole point of a measuring and reporting on a KPI is to ultimately take action.

Ø The KPI should result in obtainable objectives

Creating a metric which no one ever has a chance of getting out of the “red” and into the “green” makes no sense. It results in urgent emergency action day after day after day and ultimately is self-defeating. The objective that the KPI represents (overload less than 110% of availability for example) must be attainable.

Ø The KPI should be measureable

It’s tempting to make KPIs which are wholly subjective, where someone just plugs in a number or a color. If this is based on a feeling rather than some empirical measure, the KPI typically has little value and yet the decisions made on the basis of the KPI may be just as significant as those based on other empical measures.

Ø The KPI should not be duplicated

Just because we have a dozen different ways to display late schedules, showing all those KPIs doesn’t add value. In fact, it can be confusing and disruptive.

Ø And finally, the KPI and the actions associated with it should be understood by all decision makers. Having a common understanding among all the decision makers of what a particular measure and indicator means is critical to using KPIs effectively.

KPI Challenges

There are a number of easy mistakes that people doing this exercise for the first time face. Here are some of the most common:

Ø “Great news, I have hundreds of KPIs!”

This isn’t great news at all. Remember, what we’re after is a sip from the firehose. If you open the tap too far; if you let too much water through the hose, you’ll knock management from its feet and they won’t be able to absorb the information. Typically we look for a handful of KPIs. As Chris Iervolino, an expert in Business Performance Management (BPM) said, “Somewhere in the extensive negotiations of creating the KPIs, the ‘K’ got lost.” So, just because you can measure a thing, you don’t need to measure it.

Ø “Great news, we have only one KPI!”

Having too few KPIs is also not useful. There are always a couple of opposing forces and results that can be identified in the project management business and the whole point here is to make business decisions. Those opposing forces need to be identified and displayed in some way.

Ø KPIs are too subjective

There’s a strong incentive to invent KPIs for which there is no measure; no metric. The result is an indicator behind which is just a subjective decisions based on someone’s feeling or intuition. While many business decisions are made on a manager’s intuition, when we put subjectivity into a Key Performance Indicator, we take a subjective perspective and display it as an empirical or data-sourced result. The effect of this can be negative.

Ø The KPI has questionable completeness or quality

Imagine that we have a Key Performance Indicator that shows our resource capacity. The graphic shows the organization’s current status of all work and all resource availability and projects the expected over or under load of resources against our project and nonproject tasks in the future. But the indicator only has current project data for 20% of the projects. Another 60% of the project data is at least 30 days old and 20% of the data is missing altogether. Imagine what business decision might be made on the basis of this indicator alone and how potentially damaging that would be. When KPIs are displayed, we always recommend that there is some indicator of the indicator’s quality and the completeness of the underlying data.

Wrap up

The great news about applying the Key Performance Indicator paradigm to project and portfolio management data is that there’s typically lots of great data to choose from and the nature of the project management process results in a lot of that data being of very high formalized quality. That’s perfect for a productive KPI exercise.

If you’re getting started on choosing your KPIs, the best advice I can give is to start small. Start with 3 or 4 indicators and get the measurements of them, the display of them and the actions associated to them right. The benefits of doing this can be profound and don’t worry, you can always expand the number of indicators in the future.

Happy measuring!

At least once a week I must get a request from an organization to advise them on how to proceed with a Proof of Concept for epm software. It can be for a wide variety of epm tools and the particular flavour isn’t relevant to today’s conversation. My approach to all of these requests is the same and it often makes the requestor take pause. “We’d be delighted to help with a Proof of Concept,” I’ll say. “Please describe to me exactly what you wish to prove.”

It’s an obvious question isn’t it? Yet, in less than 10% of the cases, does the requestor have an articulate answer. I’ll get a hundred variants on “We want to see if it will work for us.” or something to that effect. When I poke in a little deeper to find out what the person really wants to accomplish, there is a disturbing but remarkably common theme. In many, many cases, the person who is trying to do a proof of concept is hoping that they can quickly establish a working project system with the enterprise tool and that management will be able to see this miraculous tool working and providing such remarkable value that they will grant the hitherto unavailable budget for a complete deployment.

Unfortunately, trying to use a Proof of Concept deployment to convince management to commit to epm or an epm tool is almost never successful. There are a couple of problems that may not seem obvious.

First of all an epm deployment, even a tiny one that you may be thinking of for this Proof of Concept requires the support of management to have any chance of success. A deployment of epm is a tiny bit about technology and a huge amount about changing behaviour or culture change. Without the direct and unequivocal support of management, you may get the technology installed but you have no chance of effecting a culture change. This is true for a 10 user deployment as much as it is for a 1000 user deployment.

Also, some of the most popular objectives for an epm deployment such as Resource Capacity Planning simply can’t be delivered until all data is in the system. Oh, you can simulate it of course, and you can certainly show an example report but you can’t see even 1/100^th of the possible value with only a tiny percentage of the data. Moreover, without management ready to demand that all users commit to the system, there is little chance of getting access to all the data anyway.

Doing an epm deployment which has a chance of producing any real value for the organization, is going to first require a period of time where senior management examines and then commits to the results they hope for from the system. We usually do this work in a vision session of some kind early on in the deployment. Without knowing what business drivers the system is expected to affect, we are in the dark as to what the epm deployment is hoped to accomplish. At best, we must use guess work or hit-and-miss targeting to hope that we find a function in the system that somehow touches a business driver an executive is committed to.

No, using a Proof of Concept for this purpose may be one of the least effective manners of getting management to commit to epm. There are numerous other alternatives. If you want to get management to get on board with your epm system plans, here are a couple of suggestions:

One of my favorite methods is to do a facilitated vision session. Both senior management and the senior project personnel usually attend although sometimes not together. The beauty of this plan is that the investment in actual money is usually very small. A vision session for epm can usually be accomplished in a couple of days. There is often some preparation work and always some post-meeting documentation but still, the investment of both time and money is comparatively minimal. The other great thing about this strategy is that no matter who the ultimate system vendor is, the exercise with senior management is never lost time. Working through the business drivers for the epm system is a critical first step and, the worst case scenario is that management and the project personnel discover that they’re not ready to commit to epm at this time.

Another strategy is to use one of the many Executive Circle types of events for management to find out more about these systems. There are events of this type hosted by almost every epm system vendor but also from associations like the PMI or others. For example, the American Management Association has recently taken a more significant interest in project management and executive seminars by this group would be a great way to introduce the concept.

Visits to other organizations that already have epm where your executives can meet their executives are also tremendously effective in this area. Not only can your executives hear about how the epm system worked for another company but they are often quite gratified in being able to network and share concerns of all types. EPM system vendors can almost always broker this kind of visit for you.

Now, if you’ve gotten this far into the column and you’re a little ticked because you don’t actually fall into this category and your proof of concept plan falls into that 10% of cases where you do know what you want to prove, well fear not, I haven’t forgotten you.

If you actually are proceeding with a Proof of Concept, here are a couple of tips to making it successful.

First, make it a project. I know it sounds silly saying this to project people, but you’d be surprised how often this kind of thing isn’t managed as a project. Do everything you’d do with any other project. Have an executive sponsor, get a budget, make a schedule, have fixed objectives. If you don’t do this, you can end up with a proof of concept implementation that drags on for months or even years. (I’m not kidding. I’ve seen such implementations go on for more than 2 years!)

Next, make sure you have not only created some objectives but also some measurements that determine what will constitute a pass or fail of the implementation. Did it do what you needed? If so, move on. If not, once you’ve exhausted the avenues available to you in making it work, close that aspect down and get to the next step.

Regardless of whether you’re looking at convincing management or proving technical functionality, make sure your Proof of Concept has a beginning and an end. Remember to use the right tool for the job. If you are using a Proof of Concept as a tool, it works best at proving something specific rather than convincing someone of a general concept.

In a remarkable number of companies I visit, fledgling internal project organizations revert towards hierarchical structures. The organization becomes managed through the department or organizational structure and project managers become attached to that structure rather than an independent project office. The PMO devolves to a reporting function and in this modern era of cost cutting becomes a prime target for evaporating altogether.

How can this happen? After all, those of us in the project management industry tend to think of project management as most critical in difficult times and there is plenty of evidence to show how projectized organizations generate tremendous levels of efficiency.

To figure this out, it’s important to think of how organizations come to be in the first place.

Organizations usually get started from an entrepreneurial spirit. Company founders use family or trusted advisors to take over key elements of the company because it’s too big to do alone. This historic perspective continues into modern day accounting and business management. Organizations are traditionally organized by function, not by result. Look at any standard accounting chart of accounts and you’ll see department oriented thinking. Look at standard budgeting and it is department organized.

So department heads have traditionally had ultimate power, thinking of themselves as the heads of their own companies within companies. That’s great right up to the point where the products the company needs to create must cross these departments in order to be completed. And it is in answer to that challenge that today’s matrix organization came about.

The Matrix organization theory is relatively new but has been almost universally accepted in organizations that do projects. The idea is that projects move across departments. The power in the organization is now shared in some manner. Department heads are still responsible for their people but the project office is responsible for producing the result. Many modern day managers have grown up in world where they’ve only experienced Matrix structures in the organizations they’ve worked in. But, is matrix management automatically the most effective path? Opinions vary.

In a perfect world, the two axes of the matrix are intended to balance each other out. We’d expect that an organization that is completely oriented to the organizational axis of the matrix would have very happy employees who were well taken care of, highly trained and well compensated but would not get a lot of project throughput. Conversely, we’d expect that an organizations that is completely oriented to the project axis of the matrix would have lots of projects being completed but would be burning out staff on a regular basis, having lots of turnover and ultimately would lose its key resources. The idea of a matrix organization is that it is conflict by design. In a matrix organization we expect the two axis to push against each other with the intent being that we will find a perfect balance.

There are two big problems with this assumption however. First, not all people are created equal. Every organizations has some managers who are more articulate, more experience more forceful, more networked, better at negotiating and better at internal politics than others. Those people who are less experienced, less connected and ultimately less powerful will suffer by comparison. The second challenge is much more significant. The traditional position of the PMO is often one with lots of responsibility but little authority. Authority rests almost always with the organizational aspect of the matrix. So, when an organization is put under pressure (as happens in a tough economy) those people in authority are pressed to protect themselves. The result is often the exact opposite of what would be good for the organization.

In the economic pressures of the last couple of years, we’ve seen a number of organizations where the role of the PMO has been degraded. It’s exactly the opposite of what you’d expect in a challenging economy. We’d expect that this would be the time where the most throughput possible would be the incentive and, to be sure, in some companies that’s the case. But, in some organizations, the pressure on the organizational department managers is to grab back as much authority as possible. These groups create their own project management groups that are specific to their departments thus paying lip service to the project management requirement but at the same time removing the most powerful benefit to the organization overall: the ability to manage work across departments.

This is most common in the largest of organizations where the size of the matrix is tough to comprehend at the best of times. The end result is a weaker and weaker PMO until in the end, the PMO is, in some cases, dissolved completely in favour of “department PMO’s” which, of course manage projects only from a hierarchical perspective; that is to say, only for their own departments.

It’s a complete return to silo management by department.

If this is something you’re experiencing and you’re responsible for the project aspect of the matrix, there are a few things you can do.

First, market, market, market. Communications from the PMO are critical. We’ve always said this to our clients but selling the PMO shouldn’t ever stop once the PMO is established. An organization with lots of responsibility and little authority needs to lobby for its position forever. It’s just part of a good PMO. So, create a blog, a collaborative workspace or a website and start pitching your benefits to the organization straight away.

Next, keep your friends close but your enemies closer. It’s an old expression but it holds true today. Make sure your portfolio selection process or your project prioritization process includes those very department heads who feel they might become disenfranchised. Making sure that people in authority don’t feel left out can eliminate a huge risk to the PMO.

Finally, become Switzerland. Being the facilitator of portfolio meetings puts you one level beyond inter-department rivalry and makes you the neutral territory on which departments can negotiate. Having a neutral territory somewhere which prides itself on its neutrality rather than an organization which is looking for authority of its own is something everyone can commit to.

Maintaining a level of balance between the organizational and project axes of your matrix organization is essential if you don’t want to risk being returned to a silo organization.

TANSTAAFL – It’s an acronym meaning “There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch” coined by science fiction writer Robert Heinlein many years ago and, as a commentary on the work ethic, it’s something I think about often. The notion that you have to be prepared to work for the results you achieve is a good one. There’s another expression that I’m sure Heinlein would have agreed with and that’s “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. With the ubiquitous Internet available to all of us, there are many tools available to project managers that are absolutely free, and I thought I’d spend a moment pointing some of them out.

Gantthead – www.gantthead.com

Gantthead burst onto the project management scene over 10 years ago. Their model was to be a center of excellence for project management information, and they’ve done a fine job. There are thousands of project managers who visit the site on a regular basis. One of the draws on the site is the remarkable number of articles, processes, downloads and other free information. Just sign up for a free login and you’ve got instant access to tons of information.

Microsoft Office Online Templates – office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates

If you’ve got any recent Microsoft Office Product, then clicking Help will bring you information from Office Online. This is an area of Microsoft’s website that carries templates for all sorts of products. Don’t choose the product first – just do a search on Project Management or just Project and you’ll find templates for MS Project, but also for Visio, Excel, PowerPoint, Access and even Word.

US Small Business Administration – www.sba.gov

The US Small Business Administration gives away a ton of information to those interested in creating a small business. A lot of this information is of use to anyone doing project management. It’s worth browsing around for 10 minutes to see if the online courses, templates for business plans, or articles are of any interest.

ITeamwork - www.iteamwork.com

This free use site allows you to use the web-based system for creating a list of tasks, assignments and notes and seeing your tasks online. It’s best for smaller projects where you can work online.

AceProject - www.aceproject.com

Here’s another interesting hosted system. It’s free for up to five users and five projects. Users can then log into the hosted site to see their assignments. You can schedule tasks, assignments, manage inter-project workload and more. If you’re a small team – it’s a tough deal to beat.

TaskJuggler – www.taskjuggler.org

More free scheduling and resource management software. This one is a Linux/Unix product available for downloading and use by a project manager who wants to see a Gantt and other key information about their project. It’s an Open Source product.

Project Workbench – www.openworkbench.org

This product is a free open-source download of the old Project Manager Workbench by ABT. ABT was bought by Niku, and Niku is now part of Computer Associates but the product still has depth and a strong set of tools for scheduling projects, grouping them into portfolios and assigning resources. Workbench was popular among the IT scheduling crowd. The publishers decided to make this product open-source and freely available for download years ago while they concentrate more on their enterprise project business.

Google Documentation – www.docs.google.com

How can you beat this? The free Google Docs service lets you upload files or create them on the fly. Since you can share docs with others in your network, you can create an easy to access site for document collaboration almost instantly.

Bluetie – www.bluetie.com

Got a project team and need an online home to collaborate? Check out Bluetie. You can become your own “Enterprise Manager” for free and add your project team right online with their own user logins. Then add tasks, contacts, calendar events and documents, and then see your to-do list along with how your team is interacting. You can upgrade to the commercial service if you need more people or capacity. If you’re keen to create your own collaboration environment, then take a look at SourceForge (below) there are numerous Windows and Linus Collaboration portal tools available for free download. Just search for “Collaboration” “Portal” on the SourceForge site.

SourceForge – www.sourceforge.net

There’s too much to list here. SourceForge is a huge repository of open-source products. Some are available for Windows, some for Linux, some for Mac and some for multiple platforms. You’ll find everything from web-based project offices to collaboration tools. Do a search on “Project Management” for literally hundreds of possible downloads.

There are many free tools and services but it’s worthwhile thinking for a moment or two before you jump on board with one or more of them. First of all, just because software is free to download doesn’t mean that the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) will be less than if you purchased a product from your regular supplier. Here are a few things to think about:

Support
How will you get support for this product? Will you have to hire someone who is an expert in that programming language or that software platform in order to be sure that you get the service you need? In some cases, you might find an open source product but not on your most commonly used platform. We have seen products in our office, for example, that would work only in Linux and the total cost for us in using them would have had to include adding personnel, or training personnel in skills that are not part of our core competency. With an Open Source product, will you have to do your own technical support? There’s no one to complain to if a calculation is wrong. If this is for a small personally run team, then perhaps the impact of such problems are minimal – but you need to think about this carefully in a corporate context.

Licensing
If you’re downloading “Free” software the license agreement is something that you might want to take a few minutes with. For example, some license agreements put responsibility on the end-users who use the software. These obligations might include posting any changes that you do to the product and not embedding the product into something you resell without offering royalties to the original publisher. Again, for the individual this isn’t likely to be a concern but in a corporate context you need to take a moment to be sure this is what you want.

Migration
Sometimes we’ll start on a product or hosted service with the notion that it looks just right for our team. But what happens if you expect down the road to move this information to a corporate system? Will you be able to extract the data in the format you need and migrate it somewhere, or will you be caught re-creating that data when you eventually migrate?

Backups
With a free hosted service how canl you be sure your data is properly backed up? Given what you’re paying (nothing!) there’s not a lot of leverage to complain when your project plan or your bid documents go missing. Check with the service to find out how you can be sure your data is safe.

Free Hosted Plans
With all the free-hosted plans, the service agreements state that there’s no guarantee the service will continue to be free or, in fact, continue at all. So, what is your contingency plan if the service evaporates overnight? Do you keep off-site backups? Can you recover your data if need be?

In the end, Heinlein has a point: There Ain’t No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. Still, some of these free products and services have some great capabilities and functionality and are worth keeping track of. The “Free” hosted services are almost always attached to paid-for services that are also extremely interesting. Go into these products and services with your eyes open and you might just find a gift horse.

For many years, one of the challenges with technology was to think of software ‘packages’. This pervasive way of thinking inevitably brings us to thinking of software as a collection of features. We even compare one product to another by listing the features on one side with the features on the other.

The idea of having software as a series of interrelated parts that could be made into plug-and-play components of a larger system often meant we would need to do lots and lots of programming of the interrelating software. Our company has focused on solution selling for years, so for us we’re used to asking a client for the problem before we list the solution. But it does make us think around here of software more as a vehicle for creating a solution, rather than a list of features that the client might find attractive.

In the last couple of years, however, there has been sufficient movement in the software business towards more common standards that we can start to think of technology as a “stack” of functionality, and interact with it as the potential for a solution, rather than the fixed list of what can be delivered on the first day.

I recently presented some project management software to a rather large company with a worldwide brand name. This company certainly has extensive project management experience but in the particular division I was interacting with, project management had always been an ad-hoc or project-by-project notion rather than centrally organized. The division’s volume of work has recently increased, however, and the complexity of that work has grown by an order of magnitude. It’s time to make project management a more formal process.

So, I showed them this software, which was rather well received. I showed the software as I often do, after extensive conversations about what the company is attempting to accomplish. Once I’d done the presentation, I turned off the projector and told a story.

“Imagine,” I said, “having to create a new project. You wouldn’t turn on the software we’d just shown you. Instead, you’d click on a link on your corporate intranet portal. The link would present a web-based form for new projects. You’d fill in this form on your terminal. You wouldn’t need specialized project management experience. You might not need to know how to create the schedule and establish the dependencies between tasks, or what a lag is, or that CPM stands for Critical Path Methodology. You’d just fill in this form.

”Depending on who you are, the form might look different. If you were a senior executive for example, certain parts of the form for approvals might not appear. Other parts of the form might only appear depending on other data you’d enter. If the project details you entered had, for example, a place for the cost of the project and that value was, say, more than $100,000 then another part of the form might instantly appear with additional fields of information required to start a project of that value.

“Now, imagine once completing that form that you click on the ‘Submit’ button and depending on who you are, and the data in the form, it is automatically sent to the person in your organization who needs to approve new projects. That person would receive an email in their Inbox. They might see the whole form there or click on a link to the form online in their browser. They would see what you had typed in but they might also see other information. Perhaps they can see right on the form, for example, the value of the project you typed but also the total value of the budget that has been allocated so far for this year. They would see different buttons on the form such as ‘Reject’ or ‘Request more details’ or ‘Approve’ or ‘Forward for approval’. They would click on the ‘Approve’ button and several things would happen. First you would get an email saying that the project is now approved. In your Enterprise Project Management system a new project would instantly appear. It would have the data from the form that you filled out. There might even be a very high level schedule of milestones if those were required in the form for new projects. The stage for the stage-gate methodology would be set to “initialized”. Other key people might be triggered by that event to create certain project documents and so on and so on.

“Now we can do the same thing with change management, budget approval, resource allocation etc.”

There was nothing on the projector. It was a story. But the story was compelling.

“That’s just what we need,” said the representative of the organization.

All of this has become possible and not just with one tool. In fact, if you wanted to make my story into a solution, there are several tools you’d go to look for. They might come from the same vendor or from several vendors.

You’ll need a server-based enterprise project management system of course. That’s a good starting point and there are a number on the market.

You’ll also need server-based workflow engine. Again, there are several on the market that are quite excellent and can be configured without having to be a programmer.

You’ll need a forms-generator for online forms to be able to create intelligent forms that can take actions in the background. Most workflow vendors have such forms-based tools embedded in them or attached to them, but most workflow tools can work with numerous forms tools.

This interoperability is all thanks to the ubiquitous presence of the Internet and the movement from older client-based systems to server-based centralized systems. This has prompted more and more vendors to open their technology. We hear more of the terms “Software as a Service” (SaaS) or “Simple Object Access Protocol” (SOAP). The movement towards Software available as a Service means that whatever functionality is available can be used by different interfaces to create blended functionality. The standard of SOAP and other such protocols means that everyone has a standard syntax and grammar for communicating between products. The end result is the potential to combine the functionality from where you can find it into the solution where you need it, and that’s all possible today.

That’s all the good news.

I know. You were waiting for the bad news weren’t you?

The challenge is what’s implied in my story. The workflow sounded wonderful to my client but, if I want to implement that technology, we need to know what the workflow is. That implies a standardization of process that everyone in the organization agrees to. As I’d mentioned earlier, this particular organization had managed projects in a very casual ad-hoc manner. So getting consensus on what the new project process might be will almost certainly take some work, and consensus is key. Also, we can, in theory, proceduralize almost anything, but the law of diminishing returns takes effect in here somewhere. There will come a point where making a formal automated process of one more procedure rather than leaving it to be managed casually won’t produce any more efficiency. There needs to be someone central to make the decision on what that point is.

Who will make the final decision on what to proceduralize? Who will have the final say on what a particular process will be? What will be the process to change or add to the process? If the processes we’re discussing will touch several departments (such as Finance, or HR) instead of just project management, then who will be the liaison for those departments? Who will be the keeper of the process? What is their authority in the organization?

This is why, when I talk about enterprise project management and what’s possible, I inevitably talk about it as a change management project rather than as a technology project. At its core, we’re asking the organization to change how it works and possibly how some core aspects of how it works. That change is always going to be a bigger challenge than the technology required to deliver the solution.

What’s important to know? That it’s now possible to blend these technologies together and as a result bring the project management process to levels of the organization that will never see or need to understand a GANTT chart or a PERT diagram.