What's the future of project management software?

 

In this video I recap the discussion at the APM Round Table debate on project management in the collaborative age, specifically the ideas we had about the future of project management software. If you would rather read, here is the transcript:

My name is Elizabeth Harrin and I’m from The Gantthead Blog, The Money Files. I’ve spent the morning with a group of people discussing collaboration tools and the future of project management technology which was a really interesting discussion and there were few points that came out that I thought I wanted to share with you.

Good collaboration tools can basically save project managers money because they can increase efficiency and they can reduce the need to travel to meetings. So there’s a lot to be said for making sure that you are up to date with the best technology that you can possibly have and that you know how to use it effectively. And those were some of the things that came out of the discussion today.

We had a representative there from the software provider Projectplace called Fredrik and he raised the issue around the future of technology in this particular type of project management tool being collaborative planning. So the way the tools are moving, it looks as if people are putting out functionality that allows project managers and their teams and their other project customers and stakeholders to collaborate effectively on the plan and make sure that is kept up to date at any one time which gives your customers more engagement in the schedule which has to be a good thing.

He also talked about mobility and the fact that project managers now are expected to travel to work and that technology needs to evolve more so than it already has to do with being able to be used on mobile phones, on iPads, tablets, touchscreen PCs and things like that.

We had a project manager there who was called Anne and she talked about the vision that she had for the future around interconnectivity between tools. She raised the point that project managers often have several different tools that they have to update especially if they’re working with social media tools both in their personal lives and in their professional lives. It ends up with a number of different logins. Interconnectivity allows software and products to talk to each other. So hopefully, tools in the future will become a lot more open in the way that they share information between each other so that we can start seeing portal style tools which consolidate feeds of information from various different places and again that should help us be more efficient.

There was a project manager there from Transport for London and he was talking about the challenges of being in a construction environment and not being able to access the information that you want to be able to run your project while you’re on a building site or in his case, potentially underground. And he said that real-time communications in construction is a really big challenge and the introduction of 4G next year will be a step in the right direction and as long as the software that project managers are using can tap into that. It helps network capability, the requirement on the bandwidth is lower then information can move backwards and forwards in real time and that’s a good thing as well.

We talked about the perceived barrier to entry for a lot of project management software products and potentially stakeholders see it as: “Oh that’s project management tool. That’s very complicated to use,” and really that isn’t the case. So we’ve got to find a way to get over this perceived barrier to entry and the fact that people don’t want to use the project management software because it seems too difficult. So maybe there’s something there in the future that software vendors can do to make it seem easier to use or to make software more intuitive so it can be used by a greater number of people.

That creates another problem which is getting the information to the right people at the right time and you want one product that serves all of your needs and as a professional project manager, you would want that to be a tool that will do scheduling, risk management, budget handling potentially, time sheets, all kinds of different bits of information that you require to manage the project effectively.

If you are a stakeholder or if you’re the project sponsor, you want to see a dashboard potentially of the major risks: ‘Are we on track; are we not on track’ for the budget and what are we doing with the scheduling: ‘Are our main tasks on time?’ which is very high level, dashboard information which is not useful for a project manager at that level.

Then you’ll have project team members who perhaps doesn’t understand a lot about the project methodology but know that they have to do certain tasks at certain times and so they will want to see the information related to them in a different way. So tools have got to be able to allow different stakeholder groups to carry out all of these different functions.

We also talked a little bit about biometrics because currently, tools require you to log in and they trust that you are who you say you are and this is particularly an issue with social media where you can create a profile on Facebook or Twitter and pretend to be whoever you want. Biometrics, which is if you log in with an eye scan or with a fingerprint, will then enable technology to determine that you are who you say you are. That sounded like an interesting way forward for software as well so that you would automatically be able to log in to different sets of tools with fingerprints or eye scanning. Apparently, that technology is already out there. It’s used on some corporate laptops, used on some tablet PCs and obviously it is used in the security industry. So it’s there. It’s just not being adequately used within the project management software arena.

So we’ve spent the morning really looking at collaboration and how technology can help us engage with our project customers more effectively. As a result of that, we thought about ways where the technology can evolve in the future and how that would help us be more effective to save more money, be more collaborative and get better engagement from the people that we are working with.

So I think a lot of ideas that came out of that and hopefully the software vendors who were there will look at ways of educating the project managers and their PMOs in those particular bits of functionality and perhaps develop some of that functionality that we’re looking for.