Practical Project Management Tips, Tactics, and Tools phần 9 potx

Gartner’s market research leads them to conclude that: • One hundred percent of customers say they cannot meet their IT service needs internally. • Seventy-five percent of customers say that, within the next 12 months, they plan to conduct some portion of B2B or B2C transactions over the Web. • Thirty percent are currently using or planning to use an IT utility service. • Thirty percent of enterprise organizations are planning on becoming vir- tual companies. • Fifteen percent of Fortune 1,000 CIOs do not want to own their IT infra- structures. This creates an environment wherein the current skill sets of External Service Providers will have to grow from Process Management to include Resource Man- agement, Demand Management, and Financial and Business Management. These expanded skill sets will include: • Process Management • Demand Management Process Engineering. Business Development. Measurement and Metrics. Relationship Management. Quality Assurance. Sales. • Resource Management Marketing. Strategic Sourcing. Communications. Capability Management. Market Research. Skills Management. • Financial & Business Management Recruitment/Retention. Competitive Analysis. Continuous Development. Financial Management. Compensation/Rewards. Product Development. Product/Service Bundling. Pricing Strategies. To support the needs expressed in the list, above, PSA solutions are being developed to automate a large variety of business functions. According to a report by SPEX, the specific functions supported may consist of any or all of these: • Administration—The tools provided to monitor and optimize the workings of the system. This includes support for automated deployment, the ability to configure alerts, customization of the user interface (UI), support for databases, and so on. There are no clear leaders in terms of administrative functionality, but each solution may approach the same problem differently. This is why we include it as a differentiator. 300 DEFINING THE PSA MARKET TEAMFLY Team-Fly ® • Opportunity Management (including sales automation and proposal management features)—The ability to manage and track contacts and competitors, perform win/loss analysis, and draft winning proposals, based on specific price margins. Opportunity management helps manage clients, ensuring greater customer intimacy. It also ensures that the most profitable opportunities become engagements. Account4 has greatly improved its CRM functionality recently, which puts it at the top with Evolve and Portera. • Human Resources (HR)—The ability to maintain information on your resources, support for training management, including online training courses, as well as the procurement of external resources from other departments, labor exchanges, partners, or even independent contractors. PeopleSoft has a clear edge here, though Portera has excellent training management functions as well. • Resource Management—The ability to search for resources across multiple pools with weighted (dynamic or static) criteria (e.g., skills, location, availability) and the ability to staff these resources in the most efficient manner possible, ensuring that no resource remains on the bench. We believe Evolve and Novient offer exceptional resource management functionality, though other vendors are beginning to gain ground in this area (e.g., Peo- pleSoft, Account4, QuickArrow, Changepoint). • Program/Project Management—The ability to track and manage programs and projects, with alerts to make sure projects will be completed on time and that the project end does not impede on profit margins. PlanView clearly offers the deepest PM functionality, though Novient has made tremendous strides, after having integrated WebProject into its PSA solution. • Time and Expenses (T&E)—The ability to enter T&Es with support online and offline, as well as support for multicurrency, multiple projects, and expenses to be applied across projects. PeopleSoft offers deep T&E functionality, as do Evolve and Portera. • Workflow Functionality—The ability to set thresholds and floors, where alerts (visual, audio, and e-mail alerts) are sent to indicate user-defined events. Workflow helps manage and automate process flow within the organization. There is no clear leader in workflow functionality as each package offers certain strengths and limitations. • Knowledge Management (including document management and best practices)—The ability to store, in a central repository, all documents related to employees, opportunities, and projects, with security and then to draw on this information to improve the effectiveness of interactions with clients, and fulfillment of engagements. Novient and Portera offer exceptional capabilities in this area. DEFINING THE PSA MARKET 301 • Reporting Tools—The ability to generate flexible and detailed reports for individuals throughout the organization (e.g., consultants, project managers, executives, clients), with support for dashboards, OLAP, and import/export. Changepoint continues to have an edge in the creation of reports, but Novient and Evolve both offer solid reporting features as well. • Billing—The ability to create detailed invoices natively that can be sent to clients. It is important to have flexibility in determining the frequency of billing cycles and adjustments that need to be made to T&Es before bills are sent out. PeopleSoft offers the richest billing functions. • Financials—The ability to track A/P, A/R, and GL to know how well the company is performing. Most packages integrate with third-party solutions to offer this functionality, but with the emergence of ERP vendors in this space, it is certainly a critical differentiator. PeopleSoft offers the richest financial functions, but other PSA vendors have solid interfaces to a greater diversity of financials applications. This is important for organizations not already using PeopleSoft for financials, which is at an additional cost. Portera offers seamless integration to a customized version of Oracle Financials. • Integration—The heavy reliance on third-party applications for CRM, HR, PM, and financials makes solid integration a necessity. At the publication of last year’s report, most integration involved flat files, but now PSA vendors are offering XML-based APIs and a few are partnering with enterprise application integration (EAI) vendors to offer greatly improved, standard interfaces to commonly used third-party solutions. In terms of APIs, most vendors offer solid XML-based APIs. (SPEX, division of Meta Group, Inc., 2001) This is all a far cry from the traditional scope of offerings from the popular PM or ERP vendors. With PSA, we are moving from buying a product, with multiple capabilities, to buying a solution, made up of several products. Unfortunately, as we see in the next chapter, there are many hurdles to clear before these solutions reach maturity. 302 DEFINING THE PSA MARKET CHAPTER 11.2 BUILDING PSA SOLUTIONS 303 P SA is an amalgam of PM and ERP, focusing on resource management (or human capital) like time, knowledge, skills, and business relationships, as op- posed to simple task management. Because the solutions are built on several different aspects of project, resource, and business management, we are finding that the purveyors of such solutions are coming from several areas of the industry. Sources of PSA Solutions For starters, we can see at least four distinct groups that are providing PSA solutions. These are: 1. Traditional PM Providers—Vendors of traditional project scheduling and management tools, such as PlanView, Account4, Artemis, Primavera, and Business Engine. 2. ERP Providers—The traditional Enterprise Resource Planning vendors, such as Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, J.D. Edwards, and Lawson. 3. PSA-specific Providers—New developers, building new solutions to support this newly identified application area. These include vendors such as Niku, Novient, Evolve, Changepoint, and Portera. In many instances, these solutions are not based on new tools, but are rather a best-of-breed creation, made via the acquisition of existing products. 4. B2B Resource Exchange—A newly emerging category. Business-to-business (B2B) tools are aimed at bringing businesses together, electronically, by providing immediate access to needs and supply data. A particularly per- tinent (to PSA) aspect of the B2B category is the sites that promote the matching of available resources to defined needs. These would include SkillsVillage and Opus360. For instance, PlanView has alliances with three B2B personnel sites. In general, the concept of the public labor exchange has not gained wide acceptance. However, a more limited model, support- ing organizations that have a predefined labor agreement (a private labor exchange), does show more immediate promise. In all cases, of the four categories described above, the vendors are being forced to extend their capabilities well outside their traditional boundaries. This is being accomplished via acquisitions, mergers, and partnerships. For instance, in the PSA-specific category, Niku acquired project management products from ABT Corporation, and Novient acquired project management capabilities from WebProject. The other categories are just as active. PeopleSoft (ERP) has acquired Skills Village, while Artemis (PM) has acquired Opus360. More recently, Lawson expanded their ERP focus to acquire one of the PSA leaders, Account4. The Typical PSA Model A problem with this emerging category is that there is no typical PSA model. The potential coverage of a PSA suite can include processes and data for a plethora of projects, resources, finances, customer relations, opportunities, and other business operations. Each emerging PSA provider tends to focus on the area in which the firm has built its reputation, slowly expanding that focus and adding new capabilities (often via the merger and acquisition route). Thus, the traditional PM providers tend to be rich in PM capabilities, whereas the ERP providers may initially emphasize the financial and human resource management functions. To complicate things even further, many early entries into this market are already redefining and redesigning their models. One of the first developers to enter and define the PSA market recently told me that they no longer label their offerings PSA. In other cases, some of the acquisitions that were made to expand product depth have been abandoned. This obviously is not a well-defined product area. To the potential PSA user, this presents both an opportunity and a risk. On the plus side, the lack of a rigid model means that there will be greater variation and selection available. The user should be able to find a provider that comes from the primary area of interest and 304 BUILDING PSA SOLUTIONS shares a common focus with the user. On the other hand, there is little assurance that the products that are offered today will be available and supported a year later. Trap The immaturity and instability of the emerging PSA line of products poses a risk to the buyer of such services. Utilizing such services on a pay-as-you-go basis (monthly subscription) reduces the potential loss of a large cash investment. However, since the cost of software licensing is a small part of the total cost of implementing such systems, having to abandon the system (or having the vendor abandon the system) reduces but does not eliminate the risk. The buyer should evaluate the risks and take them into consideration when selecting a vendor. PSA: Now You See It, Now You Don’t The emergence of a new market, PSA, has come at a difficult time. When first conceived, the technology arena, including software development, was in over- drive and investment capital was abundant. The Y2K scare had passed and the entire field was accelerating to full speed. Then the pullback hit and the market went into a holding pattern. (Or I guess a spin would be more accurate.) Especially hard hit were the PSA-specific vendors. These had not yet established a solid customer base and were working more on investment funding than client income. The more established PM and ERP vendors, although also af- fected by the pullback, had a sufficient client base and income stream to keep their heads above water. At the same time, the PSA-specific vendors appear to be redefining their tar- get market and the products to support that market. As a result, the term PSA, which ironically had originated with these firms, is being dropped, in favor of things like Workforce Optimization and Enterprise Services Automation. The marketing focus is being directed to internal IS operations and the CIO. There is less attention to Professional Service Organizations, partially because these types of organizations are suffering badly from the technical sector reces- sion. The market just isn’t there. PSA Options If you are looking for PSA type solutions, you still have several viable options. The traditional PM software vendors will continue to branch outward to PSA OPTIONS 305 embrace additional capabilities in support of enterprise-wide services management. Likewise, the leading ERP vendors will also be adding functionality to expand opportunity management, project integration, and collaboration. While this is all happening, prospective users will be advised to use caution in selecting a solution provider. If the new capabilities are being added via acquisition, it may take some time to achieve effective integration of the expanded functions. If the new capabilities are being added via internal development, it may take some time for the new features to reach maturity and become fully functional. If you need strong PM functionality, your best bet may be to stick with established PM software providers. Their offerings will usually be the strongest in support of PM requirements. If your needs center more on financial or human resource management, you can expect better support from the ERP vendors, at the expense of weaker PM support. Almost all PSA offerings will provide support for Microsoft Project. However, at this time, most PM practitioners rate that product as weaker than desired to support enterprise-level project management. Another area of concern is the actual execution of the PSA capability within the organization. Unless your organization is willing to adapt its practices to match the out-of-the-box solution provided by the software vendor, you can expect to require customization of the application, using third-party providers. Therefore, you can expect to make a choice among: • An out-of-the-box solution—accepting the design of the software vendor to drive your practices. • A biased solution—emphasizing the focus of the vendor, toward either PM functionality or ERP functionality. • A best-of-breed solution—selecting components from various providers and building a custom application and integration of the tools. Trap The term best-of-breed would lead us to believe that such solutions contain the best components possible. While this is po- tentially true, the fact is that the capabilities of best-of-breed products can be negated by the lack of seamless integration of the components. This has been a problem for those firms that acquire (or partner with) the best products, but struggle to make them work well together. It usually takes a few generations of system development to smooth out the problems of different characteristics and cultures of the individual components. 306 BUILDING PSA SOLUTIONS SECTION 12 TOOLS OF THE TRADE T hroughout this book, we continually express the position that project management isn’t just about using the computer for planning and control. Rather, we have pleaded with you to address the issues of organizing for project management and developing appropriate project management practices and procedures. Only then can we be in a position to select and utilize computerized tools for project management. But now it is time to look at the subject of using the computer to support our project management practices. The act of specifying, evaluating, and selecting project management software can be intimidating and confusing. Often, we are called upon to initiate this ac- tion while under the extreme pressure of dealing with a project in crisis, and under the extreme limitation of not knowing anything about what we really expect these tools to do. Frankly, when I have been asked to advise an organization on the issue of selecting project management software, I try to get the group to sit through a seminar on project management basics prior to initializing the selection process. Unfortunately, as important as this step is, it is not always practical to exercise. In Chapter 1.4, we illustrated a recommended plan for the implementation of a computer-based project management capability. This consisted of five steps, starting with (1) Methods, (2) Tools, (3) Training. It is essential that this first step, determining your methods of project management, precede the selection of the tools. The tools are required to support your method of project management. We can easily direct you to a process for specifying, evaluating, and selecting project management software that can take a good part of a year and involve ex- tensive use of resources. However, the name of this book is Practical Project Management. So we will compromise by providing a simplified approach to project management software selection, in Chapter 12.1. This process will get you up and running. It is certainly possible that what you come up with will not be per- fect (there is no way to expect that even with a very diligent selection process). 307 But it will put you in position to have automation support for your project management practices, and to learn from the initial experiences so that both the practices and the tools can be improved as your project management capabilities mature. While you are out looking at the available tools for project management, you will likely run across several new categories of automation support, in addition to the traditional CPM-based products. Some of these are new capabilities and some are rearrangements of older capabilities, with new names. We discuss the emergence of these new tools in Chapter 12.2. Along with the emergence of the rebadged capabilities is a whole set of new capabilities that build upon the new web-based environment. Collaboration Ser- vices, Business-to-Business Services, Gateways and Portals, are all part of the twenty-first century’s gift to project management practitioners—providing us with a greater reach to information and knowledge and greatly enhancing and speeding up communication. We discuss the e revolution in Chapter 12.3. 308 TOOLS OF THE TRADE CHAPTER 12.1 A SIMPLIFIED AND BALANCED APPROACH TO PM SOFTWARE SELECTION 309 C hapter 1.4 outlines the five key steps to implementing a computer-based project management capability. The five components of this process are: 1. Methods. 2. Tools (Software Selection). 3. Training. 4. Implementation Plan. 5. Audit Process. In that chapter, we deferred detailed discussion of the second component to this section on Tools of the Trade. We start off with a few of the comments that were presented earlier followed by a practical method of selecting the tools that you will need to support your project management initiatives. Software Selection It is very easy to go overboard with the PM software selection process. I have seen teams of more than 50 people formed and spend two years in a structured selection process. A selection specification was developed that would dwarf a phone book. Vendors were called in for presentations. Shortlist products were [...]... tool and a gateway to other needed services SECTION 13 MAKING PROJECT MANAGEMENT WORK P roject Management is an ART Project Management is a SCIENCE Project Management is a PROCESS Yes, it is all of these But, most of all, Project Management is a lot of COMMON SENSE Without organizing for project management, and without establishing a set of project management practices and developing a project management. .. both the methodologies and the tools to support Project Portfolio Management To date, there has been more talk on the subject than substance Look for tools that address enterprise and project objectives and tie them to project planning and control systems We discuss Project Portfolio Management in greater depth in Section 9 Trap Don’t be fooled by the label Project Portfolio Management It may just... pretentious inflation of traditional Project Management Real PPM would involve integration of project and operations data and concerns This is different from Project Management, Enterprise Project Management, and Engagement Management Professional Services Automation According to Ted Tzirimis, of SPEX, Professional Services Automation (PSA) is an amalgam of Project Management (PM) and Enterprise Resource Planning... document management, knowledge management, workflow) Typical PSA software is a collection of any of the following capabilities: Sales Force Automation (SFA), Opportunity Management, Resource Management, Human Resources, Program /Project Management, Time and Expense Management (T&E), Document Management, Knowledge or Practice Management, Invoicing and Billing (Financials), and Customer Relationship Management. .. Contingency is discussed in Chapter 3.2 Project Portfolio Management Would a rose by any other name smell as sweet? Is Enterprise Project Management better than Project Management? In essence it is usually the same It just recognizes that the management of projects usually involves more than one What about Engagement Management? It’s just another label for Project Management It is primarily used by consulting... given to Objectives, Goals, Strategies, Project Selection and Mix, and Cash Flow On the Projects Management side, we look at: Schedule/Time, Project Cost, Performance, Stakeholder Satisfaction, and Scope/Change Control So what we have here is a rebadging of these two disciplines in an environment that bridges the gap between Operations Management and Project Management As with any of the other topics... integrating projects with service requests and standard activities A project schedule is meaningful only if the resource assignments are based on true availability; (3) integration of risk and change management into the scheduling process Technology projects are inherently risky (much more than bridge or building projects) and acknowledging that risk and managing it is critical; (4) the relationship between project. .. project schedules or forecasts and the actual performance both in meeting delivery dates and accounting for the spent or charged resources Integration of project management and project accounting for both progressing and customer billing is a current reality Linking project schedules to contracts and customer information is also a reality today; (5) project scheduling and resource assignment are organizational... Accounting and billing practices in the new environment Maximizing the knowledge management and knowledge transfer What Do You See as Some of the Key Trends in the Area of B2B for PM and IT/AD Projects? • • • • • Clearer definition of the buyer/contractor relationship New payment systems that do not include invoices Expanded management information systems Integrated project management, resource management, and. .. and control in addition to learning the new tool Information Overload Over the past 15 years, I have written, taught, lectured, and consulted on the topic of Specifying, Evaluating, and Selecting Project Management Software This includes a formal seminar, a book Project Management Using Microcomputers (Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 198 6), a chapter on that topic in David I Cleland’s Field Guide to Project Management . from Process Management to include Resource Man- agement, Demand Management, and Financial and Business Management. These expanded skill sets will include: • Process Management • Demand Management Process. Changepoint). • Program /Project Management The ability to track and manage programs and projects, with alerts to make sure projects will be completed on time and that the project end does not impede. computer for planning and control. Rather, we have pleaded with you to address the issues of organizing for project management and developing appropriate project management practices and procedures.

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