Evaluating Project Management Software

We have helped dozens of organizations evaluate project management software and implement it for various purposes.  Additionally, we are often called in to fix an unsuccessful implementation and get to observe what worked and what didn’t.

Whether you are looking for software for an Earned Value Management  or Enterprise Project Management, your first step should be to define requirements. 

Define your Business Drivers / Requirements

A common theme we see in unsuccessful implementations is that they didn’t define requirements or use a checklist of requirements defined by Project Management features and functions.  Requirements for any type of Project Management software should first be defined in terms of the business problem your organization is committed to solve or in terms of business capabilities you are committed to achieve.  Examples might be to: reduce time to market for new products or increase billable time for your staff. No software system will achieve these goals without process and training but it is important to define these goals and use them to determine requirements before evaluating Project Management software.

Sometimes requirements are stated in a way that leads to selecting the wrong type of product or one that solves a problem you are not ready to tackle.  A common example of this is around Resource Management.  We understand many different types of Resource Management business drivers and many distinct types of solutions on the market.  If what you meant was “tactical team oriented Resource optimization”, but what the vendor sold you was Resource Capacity planning at the Portfolio level, you may end up with project management software that cannot be successfully implemented in your organization. Developing Project Management Scenarios, described below, will help eliminate this confusion.

To determine your requirements you will need to enlist stakeholders from your organization who can describe their needs from the Project Management software.  In most cases this will involve Project Managers, Finance and Accounting, Portfolio Managers, Resource Managers, Product Managers and Program Managers.  Other stakeholders will include Information Technology, Departmental heads and General Managers. When you have documented these individuals’ needs and mapped them back to benefits such as return on investment, time to market or things like market share or Government contracting needs you will have solid requirements.

Requirements are best expressed in two ways:

• A checklist of required characteristics that the project management software must have (e.g. runs using Oracle database). These can be categorized into ‘Must Have’ and ‘Nice to Have’.
• Project Management Scenarios that the project management software tools need to support

Define your Project Management Scenarios

Having a good set of requirements is only a part of defining your needs for project management software. The next step is defining key Project Management Scenarios your organization needs to support to achieve your business drivers and the capabilities needed to support them.  We have seen great success when business oriented Use Cases are developed to model representative “real world” scenarios.  An example of a Use Case could be something like: “A key employee resigns. The Department Manager has to identify the impact on current projects”. The Use Case lays out the steps (manual and automated) that the individuals involved will take and where the Project Management software will be used. If you build the right Uses Cases you’ll definitely be able to evaluate the Project Management software presented to you by the various Project Management software vendors.

We are not suggesting that full development of Project Management processes happens before you either evaluate project management software products or begin your implementation.  Developing your project management processes is best done in parallel with implementing project management software tools so that you can mesh the two together.

Many organizations have not implemented Enterprise Project Management, Earned Value Management or other types of robust Project Management software before.  This may mean that they have no one available with enough experience to define Scenarios/Use Cases to support their Business Drivers.  We strongly suggest that you find this expertise through us or someone else who has implemented a good number of Project Management software.

One thing is sure, if you don’t develop these scenarios now you will encounter them by the time you fully implement and move into production.  The question will be, did you pick the right software and implement it correctly for your organizations goals?

Infrastructure and Integration

To achieve consistent adoption of project management practices and tools across an Enterprise the project management software needs to be integrated and reconciled with your other business systems. This means you need to capture requirements such that the selected tools will fit with your IT strategy.

The goal of integrating your project management software is to eliminate duplicate data entry, have a single source of data and eliminate redundant systems. Implementations of new project management software often fail because they are additive to a project managers workload rather than simplifying and reducing it.

Understand what type of Project Management Software you need

Understanding the types of software on the market can be daunting.  There are a large number of different vendors in this market and they represent a wide variety of approaches to Project Management software, even if they sound the same in their marketing materials.

Software for Earned Value Management is generally made up of a scheduling engine, a cost engine and perhaps a reporting engine. You can decide to look for a vendor (e.g. Deltek) that offers all these or select ‘best in class’ in each category.

Typically, most of the functionality required for Enterprise Project Management implementations can be purchased from individual vendors (e.g. Primavera, Microsoft, Computer Associates, PlanView) but there are opportunities to mix and match here as well.

Factor in your Project Management Maturity and desired Capabilities

When you are evaluating project management software consider your current and future goals and your organizations Project Management Maturity.  Companies often select project management software with the most “bells and whistles” and complicate their implementation because their users aren’t ready for the discipline that these tools require to be useful. Exercise the Use Cases you have developed to ensure you understand what expertise is required to use the software. We are strong believers in an Evolutionary or Iterative approach to implementation to increase Adoption of Project Management software.

Ensure Adoption of your Project Management Software

We are often called in to re-implement Earned Value Management and Enterprise Project Management when earlier attempts have failed.  Generally the project management software is blamed but is usually not the primary problem. Repeatedly we see groups with little in the way of formal Project Management methods trying to implement very rigorous tools and techniques in one step.  These can either be rejected by parts, or all, of the organization.  Either way Adoption of the desired Project Management software fails.  Selecting a tool and getting it deployed are a small part of the challenge. The bigger challenge is getting people to use it across the organization: if a tool is not appropriate or not well deployed users will find a way of avoiding it or paying lip service to it detracting from the potential success of the implementation.

Often the Project Management tool selected could have been implemented with a less rigid and more flexible approach, but the software vendor and the client, took a cookie cutter approach.   There is no one size fits all approach for Project Management software.  Your selection of tools, your implementation approach and your measurement of Adoption must be based on your organizations business goals, desired Earned Value Management and Enterprise Project Management capabilities.

Talk to a Pinnacle professional regarding a Project Management software that is right for your organization and goals. - Give Us a Call or