Following Footprints to Your Project Management Goals

Throughout gantthead, you’ll find information and opinions about lots of technologies that could support your project management office. There are many resources to help you evaluate the technical merits of one type of technology or tool set against another. PMI, for example, has published an entire report on project management tools (as of about a year ago, which makes it out of date already, but still good reading!). What isn’t as easy to find is a method of looking at the comparative risks and leverage points for bringing in different tools based on the characteristics of your particular organization. Aloow us to introduce you to a method called "technology footprinting," which helps you analyze risks and leverage points that are common across a wide span of organizations but tuned to your organization’s unique perspective on them. This article will discuss the general technique. Future articles in gantthead's Project Management department will look at each of the default dimensions for footprinting to help you understand how to best evaluate each dimension in your organization.

There are many considerations besides the technology itself that need to be considered when bringing in something new. Things like the size of the change in the organization’s behavior that will be required, the amount of sponsorship that will be …