Microsoft Project Server is Driving Innovation at Small and Mid-Sized Companies

Small and mid-sized corporate users of Microsoft Project Server (MSP) are developing increasingly innovative ways to employ this collaborative technology in ways that extend far beyond its core project management-oriented focus.  

Often, using third-party hosted instances of MSP to lower entry costs and set-up headaches, these MSP pioneers are employing the technology in key business functions beyond project and schedule management like financial management, human resources planning, strategic planning and more.   

Small companies without ERP or cost accounting systems are using Project Server to produce data driven revenue and business pipeline projections, freeing managers from error-prone “spreadsheet-hell”, and providing a much more solid project-focused basis for forecasting.  The same data is helping highly matrixed and rapidly growing organizations to plan recruiting and hiring efforts, with clear signals from Project Server that show what skills are needed, where, and when.

Perhaps most importantly, the nebulous concept of “Portfolio Management” has become a reality for companies of all sizes that are employing Project Server 2010’s Portfolio Optimizer to guide the portfolio and capital planning and decision-making process in an objective, predictable and repeatable manner, helping to mitigate the influence and impact of company politics, sacred cows, and overbearing C-suite inhabitants in capital, portfolio and strategic planning efforts.

As Microsoft pushes its MS Project Server 2013 offering into the Cloud, it will be interesting to see whether this trend increases for Microsoft EPM as the “go to” project and portfolio management solution for smaller and mid-sized project-driven companies.

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