Are You Really Going to Implement That ERPM System?

Any company in the process of assessing Enterprise Project Management tools faces a daunting task today.  Take a look at PMI or gantthead's Tools section and you'll soon discover the number of choices is literally in the hundreds.  What was once a field dominated by several large players, such as ABT, Artemis, Primavera and PlanView, is now a landscape dotted with dozens of companies offering web-based products, ASP "time-shared" systems, integrated "collaboration" tools, PSA systems and the like. True, the "big" players are still around and still represent the majority of larger implementations in marketplace, but even they have begun to expand their product offering, merged or integrated various third-party products and broadened their product focus.  In many ways, what was the "ERP" world of the '80s and '90s, dominated by such companies as BAAN, Oracle, SAP, JD Edwards and others, has now become the "ERPM" world of today.

Surely, we, as skilled, often "certified" project managers running these implementations, know what it takes to bring home a successful project.  That being the case, why do so many large EPRM implementations fall short of their stated goal?  Skilled project managers know how important it is to manage scope, to construct a communication plan, to assess and…