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.
Training for enterprise systems like TimeControl is never really complete because the organization adapts and evolves as it uses the software. Training for such systems is best done in layers or phases.
Gotta love Dilbert. This has Scott Adams looking at the dangers of putting your project schedule on a white board instead of software.
Microsoft has published an article of mine on TechNet. This one is about Dashboards and the art of dashboarding on Project Server. While that’s not so unusual. I publish articles there semi-regularly. This one actually appears on the front cover of Technet at technet.microsoft.com. That’s rather flattering. See this post for all the links and details.
Microsoft doesn’t do it every year but next year they will once again be holding a conference for Microsoft Project. This usually signals that Microsoft has a new version to show us and, yes, it’s fairly certain we’ll be hearing all about Project version 15 when the conference rolls around. The conference is March 19-22, 2012 in Phoenix. For registration information go to: www.msprojectconference.com Oh, and will I be there? You bet.
Project Management Insights blog interviewed me about Real Time Project Management. You can read the complete interview on their blog.
Microsoft has released the long-awaited Service Pack 1 for Microsoft Project 2010 and Project Server 2010. Download details for the Service Pack and the recommended June 2011 Cumulative Update are included in this post.
Microsoft has published another of my articles, this one on Enterprise Systems Best Practices. This article looks at some of the key success/failure criteria to any enterprise system including, of course, EPM Systems. Those factors include: finding a business owner, knowing what problem the system is supposed to solve, making sure it’s part of your enterprise technical architecture and implementing change management.
Many organizations deploy enterprise systems and many of these deployments generate tremendous efficiencies in the organization. However, some organizations get tempted to deploy more than one enterprise system at the same time and this can lead to a tremendous challenge or even failure of both systems. In some cases, the two systems are pushed into one massive project, in other cases, separate teams pull the company into different directions at the same time. This article looks at the particular challenge of doing more than one enterprise system deployment at a time.
The April Cumulative update for Project and Project Server 2007 and 2010 have been released. Catch the details and relevant links here.