Do PPM Tools Hurt Collaboration?

Wayne leads product marketing for Oracle | Primavera and previously served as VP of Marketing for cloud PPM leader Instantis before it was acquired by Oracle.

  Communications Management   Portfolio Management   ProjectsAtWork  

Most project portfolio management systems focus on representing status in "quantitative" terms, while the "qualitative" stuff captured in human interactions can be lost. Collaboration solutions that leverage social media can help, but they must be more than generic platforms bolted onto a PPM solution.

Before there were project portfolio management systems, didn't project managers and team members need to share project status, issues, risks and results more directly with each other through old-fashion conference room meetings, water cooler conversations and email for more distributed teams?

Nowadays, you have to find about these kinds of things through the "official" channel — your friendly neighborhood PPM system. In fact, you have to find out if the project you are working on actually "exists" by consulting with the PPM system. Many PPM software vendors have proudly quoted their customers exclaiming "if the project isn't in [insert PPM system brand here], it doesn't exist" as evidence of the successful and broad adoption of the system and the processes it automates.

To be fair to PPM systems, nothing formally or practically exists in an organization anymore unless it's recorded in a system, including employees, orders, inventory, pay, warranties and so on. Further, the benefits of PPM systems, especially for …

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