By: Chris Vandersluis I had the unfortunate experience lately of working with a very unhappy group within one of the federally funded agencies. As usual, I won’t bore you with who it was to protect the guilty but the experience has become so common around here that I thought I’d share it with you in this column. The situation starts out like so many organizations interested in enterprise project management. Project management personnel and IT…
Article: hat does EPM mean to you? It’s an easy to use acronym and goodness’ knows, we use too many acronyms in this industry. EPM can represent so many differents things to different people. If you’re looking to deploy EPM wouldn’t a good place to start be having a common definition?
Article: The move to Solution Buying We’ve heard the hype for years that ever software vendor is a ‘solution seller’. They’re only out to make sure you get your solution, according to the solution salespeople. I think that’s great if it’s true, but what’s less common is a client who’s ready to be a “Solution Buyer”.
Article: The Dash for Dashboards Dashboard views are all the rage within the executive suite. There is a notion, fed in large part by software vendors, that executives can get real time levers and dials like they would while driving down the freeway so they can make instant decisions. While creating dashboard views is quite easy now compared to several years ago, there’re more to creating such displays than just picking out the graphics.
Article: Project Management System Training Wheels When we talk about project management systems, we tend not to talk so much about the training these systems will require. Vendors don’t help by advertising “Easy to Use” and “No training required”. Project Management includes complex concepts and these are not all taken care of by an easy to use interface. This article talks about considerations for training in any new EPM system deployment.
Article: Project Management and the Web How has the Internet and the ubiquitous web interface transformed the project management industry and aside from the new commercial tools that naturally appear whenever there is a new platform to write them on, what does this new medium empower for project managers?
Article: PPM and a whole new generation of acronyms The extension of Enterprise Project Management concepts into the Project Portfolio Management paradigm means a whole slew of new definitions and their requisite acronyms. How do the definitions within PPM match up with EPM and where do the concepts overlap?
Article: Multi-Project Management – Who owns what? When you move from managing one project at a time to a more integrated model where the milestones, the resources, the facilities and even the budget are shared, how do you determine who owns what part of the project management process?
Article: Integrated PM System and the Project Maturity Model With the release of Microsoft Project Server originally in 2002, Microsoft catapulted itself from the ranks of individual project management software provider to organizational or enterprise provider. How does EPM software like Project Server affect an organization’s score in the Project Management Maturity Model?
Getting project managers to share and executives to prioritize In many of the EPM deployments I’ve been involved with I run up against two significant cultural challenges. The first comes from the project managers themselves who, while they claim to be committed to the orgazational nature of the Enterprise Project Management process, suddenly find themselves reluctant to share their own data. The second comes from the very executives who have requested that an EPM process…