The Not-So-Silver Bullet

Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.

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A little while back, I got a call from a CIO that I have worked with a few times before. He phoned to tell me that he was moving the entire project support infrastructure within his organization to the cloud. He was very excited to tell me how he had worked with the project owners on the business side and that they had reviewed a number of options and agreed on a platform and suite of products that would save them from investing in a new in-house infrastructure, would allow them to improve the collaboration between offices in different locations and would provide improved reporting on a project, program and portfolio basis. He was convinced that they had done everything that they needed to do to make this work, and they were now in the process of rolling it out across their entire portfolio.

Fast-forward to my next meeting with this individual, and he was far less upbeat about this “silver bullet” solution. Some projects seemed to be embracing the tools and project managers were reporting that teams were finding it much easier to work together on deliverables. There were a few teething problems, but the PMs didn’t seem to think that these were huge issues and that confidence and skills with the tool were developing well. Other project managers were less positive, complaining that their teams were struggling to see the benefits of the tools, that …

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