Just having good project management techniques is not enough. How will you sell your great process to management?
When your job is building the elements of construction are usually quite well known. When you’re building software however, everything you’re building with from the foundation materials to the tools themselves are changing while you construct. What hope is there for project management if this is so?
For organizations that are all about their hierarchical organization, projectizing the business can be the fastest path to more efficiency.
Deploying Project Server isn’t just deploying one product. That’s why Microsoft refers to it as the Microsoft EPM Solution. There’s a whole stack of technology working in layers in the background. How will this chagne in 2010 and how can the stack be tamed?
Simon Moore’s book on Strategic Project Portfolio Management is finally out. I got to see an advanced copy and was delighted to put my remarks on the jacket.
Should you integrate systems intimately together or create an interface between them and leave them to work more independently? Integrate or Interface?
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.
Is the original premise of project management software still the driving force? Is the critical path calculation still what makes projects run? Perhaps the entire industry has moved on.
You’d think that ERP systems would be the be-all and end-all of products. Why then are vendors like SAP and Oracle so keen to have 3rd party vendors on their list. The answer of course is that it’s quite common to integrate specific tools with these ERP beheamouths in order to create a complete solution.
Creating products and systems for deployment is challenging enough but what if you had to deploy an enterprise system across national boundaries. Have you thought of the implications of language, time zones, currency differences and regional operating system settings? Here’s a primer on what to think about.
If your organization has gone beyond handing out agendas annually to the staff in an attempt to become more effective, then it’s time to look at tracking and managing time across the organization. Where is time being used that’s not productive for either the organiztion or the individual? Only with a centralized timesheet systemm can this be answered. Here are some tips on getting such a system selected and implemented.
Microsoft’s leading lady these days is SharePoint. With SharePoint Server being the queen bee are all other server products at Microsoft destined to be just worker bees? Could Project Server end up as just another blade of a SharePoint Server?
Communications is at the heart of what makes a project manager effective and much has been written on the subject. The tools available to the modern project manager however provide a wealth of options on how to be effective at creating a project communications plan.
Project Management systems are changing profoundly as the users evolve from highly specialized full-time schedulers to a much broader audience. Workflow combined with online forms technology will be at the heart of this change.
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?