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I just finished a great week at Collaborate14, the Orace Application Users Group conference where I was asked to speak about the Benefits of the As-Built Schedule.  Despite being in the very last speaking slot of the conference in the Primavera track, there were a number of die-hard fans who attended. For those who were there or those who missed the conference, the slides can be downloaded at: www.epmguidance.com/resources/The_As-Built_Schedule.pdf.  The Excel spreadsheet I used for…

Many of us have heard of the concept of a Project Maturity Model but what about our systems? This article extends the concept originally created by Carnegie Mellon to the Project Management Systems Maturity Model. Should you deploy all aspects of your project management system on the first day? Probably not.

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.

Resource management is the most popular reason organizations will switch from individual project management to enterprise project management so you’d think that would mean we’d have an extensive playbook on how to get the very best resource management out of such systems.
If only.

This article was what kicked off the Microsoft TechNet “From the Trenches” column which I still write for. It addresses a key question: When deploying an EPM system should you a) make a big bang type of approach to release all designed EPM functionality at once or b) go with a more phased approach. And, if so, why?

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.

Microsoft maintains a column that I write on TechNet called “From the Trenches. My latest column there is entitled “Creating an EPM Deployment Plan” and discusses the elements of an EPM Deployment that are not just technical. From getting management on board with the original decision making requirements to ensuring that the solution solves the problem it was purchased for, this article opens the door to the many things that need to be considered in deploying an EPM solution.