Tony ParlamasIT Manager| Texas Dept. of TransporationCorpus Christi, Tx, United States
Hi,
I'm an IT Manager with a large state transportation agency. We are looking into using a PPM or PM solution to help us manage our engineering functions including environmental clearances, design, right of way aquistion and other activities from an enterprise level. My question: Are there solutions out there that are tailored to non-IT projects? Or, in other words, can we leverage IT project management concepts with other business functions. If so, which commerical products lend themselves as such?
Many PM products are for non-IT areas. Spider Project is a complex package that is optimized for business modeling, especially in process- and product-intensive industries like energy and manufacturing. Primavera was first created for the Construction industry, and is still a dominant player in that field.
Many of the tools out there are listed as "general purpose", like MS Project and its Server family of products. Beware of the system integrators who set them up, though. By definition, they are IT people and they often have a real IT-oriented bias. If they set up all your standard project lifecycles as Requirements-Design-Code-Test-Deploy, then you know you have a problem. My recommendation is to look for other transportation agencies and see what products have worked for them.
Without knowing anything more about your business, I would recommend taking a close look at Primavera. Transportation projects often share a lot in common with commercial construction, which is Primavera's primary industry. If you can find a system integrator who knows MS Project and who knows state transportation, they could probably set up MS Project Server to work well with your business as well. There might be niche software packages in your area, also. Saving Changes...
