Should Technology and Process Coexist?

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.

  Portfolio Management   Risk Management  

I recently wrote some fairly detailed work on risk management processes, and when I asked someone to review it their comment was: “You haven’t integrated software tools into this.” I explained that this was deliberate, that I felt that technology should be an overlay to the process work--we should start with a solid process and then look for ways that technology could make life easier in the execution of the process. This led to a rather lengthy discussion around how technology and process should coexist as my colleague believes that the readily available software tools today fundamentally changed the way that processes were developed, implemented and managed.

I thought that it was worth summarizing the debate here and I would be interested in your thoughts on the topic.

Process-related technology
Clearly, technology is now dominant in virtually every element of our working lives. But we were thinking specifically about tools that would directly impact the management and execution of process. The obvious such tool is project portfolio management (PPM) software, something that has become far more prevalent in organizations in recent years as well as becoming easier to use and integrate with the organization. Even where organizations don’t have a full PPM solution, they likely have elements that can support processes--collaboration tools, …

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