Welcome to a whole new year of the EPMGuidance.com blog. It’s early in the new year but if you were following along with the pace of blog posts and new content from the last few months, you’ll be happy to know that upcoming content is on its way. There are new blog posts scheduled for every week between now and the end of June at least so make sure you’re stopping by regularly or subscribing…
I’ve been a proponent of Enterprise Project Management since I first entered the project management industry in the early 1980s. You’d think, then, that I would always vote on the side of centralized project management, but that isn’t always the case. Let’s discuss for a moment just what we mean by Enterprise Project Management. EPM can mean a lot of different things to different people. I’ve already discussed in other articles in this column how…
Years ago I wrote an article about how project management required tracking not just planning. It was a time when many organizations used the terms project management and project planning synonymously. In fact many of what we referred to at the time as project management software systems were, in fact Critical Path Methodology calculators which were all about the planned schedule and very little about the actual progress. It’s almost 15 years later but it…
In 1966, the original Batman TV series came on the air. It lasted only 120 episodes but it changed a culture in ways that last to this day. In the world of Batman and Robin (played by Adam West and Burt Ward), there was a ‘bat’ solution to everything. No matter what the problem, Batman would have the solution. The Batmobile, Batboat, Batplane, and Batcave all had their place. And if you were someone who…
Over the years the most successful Enterprise Project Management deployments I’ve been involved with have always had a strong executive connection. In comparison, those deployments which have been the most difficult, have been those where our connection to senior management was kept at arm’s length. It’s made me do some thinking about what causes executives to be more or less involved and what recommendations I can make to organizations at the very earliest stages of…
Services are a key factor in the success of project management software vendors. With the trend towards certification how will clients know who has the skills they require? I thought I’d spend some time talking about one of the most significant elements of technology deployment in the project management sector – services. With numerous project management software vendors, the revenue from services outweighs the revenue from software sales. Perhaps that’s a good thing. After all,…
[Note: An earlier version of this article was produced for Microsoft TechNet] In project management circles we tend to talk often about a matrix management environment. Matrix management isn’t anything new. It has become the de facto standard for management in virtually all high-tech organizations. The idea of matrix management came out of management thinking in the early 70s. J.R. Galbraith gives us one of the first published works on the subject in 1971 talking…
I’ve been writing for Microsoft’s TechNet website on the subject of enterprise project management. You may have seen the column called “From the Trenches” which got going out of all those articles. They have been available from the Microsoft Project and Project Server sections of TechNet. Microsoft has decided to elevate all that writing to be available to a more general audience. You can now find the From the Trenches column on Office.com. Since not…
By: Chris Vandersluis I wrote an earlier version of this article for Microsoft’s TechNet. This update has been created for the EPMGuidance site. In project management circles it is common to talk about matrix management. Matrix management isn’t anything new. It has been a management standard in most high-tech organizations. The idea of matrix management came out of management thinking in the early 70s. J.R. Galbraith published an article talking about how to combine organizational…
The most common practices of purchasing enterprise solution software are often the least effective. This article talks about how to avoid the pitfalls of commodity purchasing when selecting enterprise systems and how to create a purchasing RFP that has the best chance of solving your business problems.