Ken MeibosIT Systems Training Educator II| Parkland Health and Hospital SystemDallas, Tx, United States
The best tool (nothing is perfect, as evidenced by your attempt) would also consider the portfolio of the many projects being undertaken by the enterprise as a whole. The enterprise resource pool contains not only human resources but equiptment and material resources as well.
Managing all of the elements of a project requires a tool that can track all of these components. For multiple projects you need to be able to link resources used to the central pool in order to track over-allocations across the enterprise.
Most executive stakeholders want the numbers represented visually. Traffic signals are a common means of communicating project status.
But being able to drill the data stored in the project files for meaningful business intelligence is essential to having the best PPM. Saving Changes...
Mark Price PerryBusiness Driven PMO Evangelist| BOT InternationalOrlando, Fl, United States
Ken, I certainly agree with you in principle and in theory regarding EPM tools, features, and functions. In practice, however, some organizations, perhaps many organizations, do not have quality or even adequate EPM processes for project management, portfolio management, governance, and continuous improvement. Edward Deming states, "95% of the problem is due to the process, only 5% due to people and tools." This is especially true with EPM. Though it is hard to not get wrapped up in the vendor, consultant, and analyst buzz over EPM features and functions, a more useful approach wold be to focus on the customer's EPM process and the EPM product feature sets best suited to suuport that process. Though an EPM vendor would never say this, if an organization does not have a defined EPM process then they really shouldn't even be assessing or evaluating EPM tools. The leading EPM vendors have quite good products, features, and functions. It is hard to pick a bad product. But good EPM products can and do fail when implemented with weak or non-existing EPM processes. On the other hand, has anyone heard of a well implemented, quality EPM process that failed on account of a weak tool..? Admittedly, I view processes as an investment and tools as an expense. Hope this helps. -- Mark Perry, VP of Customer Care, BOT International Saving Changes...
