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Tag: Leadership

The 21st Century

Written by Cynthia Low on . Posted in Articles. 5 Comments on The 21st Century

Since its emergence in the early 1970s, IT has been built from the bottom up. Applications to support the business were deployed as the need arose to increase efficiency and support growth. Because systems were not architected from the top down, the result has been a legacy of inconsistency, redundancy and the type of complexity that makes change difficult without destabilizing the whole system. As organizations compete in the global economy, they need systems that are agile, easy to change and responsive to new business needs.

In mature organizations, IT is currently undergoing a twofold transformation. One, the IT culture is changing from a provider of technology to a provider of valuable services, and two, IT assets, products and services are being aligned with business strategies. Project management and business analysis are critical to making the transformation succeed.

A New Discipline for IT

Young or immature IT groups focus narrowly on technical implementations. Here, IT is merely a provider of technology, responsible for maintenance and support. Project management centers around budget, schedule, scope and system specifications, and much time is spent recovering from failures, modifying or replacing components to eliminate problems, carrying out additions, modifications or removals to introduce improved functionality. Because the number of incidents, problems and changes exceeds staff capacity, IT needs a way to determine how it can best use its resources so that the issues it does tackle will yield the most business benefit. The only way that prioritization can be accomplished is with guidance from customers and users, but that discussion cannot be carried out effectively in technical language.

This is where ITSM (IT Service Management) comes in. It provides an effective framework of tools and templates for helping IT groups become more adaptive, flexible, cost-effective and service-oriented. ITSM drives fundamental change within the IT organization, from how it manages its processes, technology assets and vendors and deploys personnel, to how staff view their organizational roles. An ITSM-based IT organization seeks to understand the customer’s service requirements, agrees with the customer on the delivery of the service, and operates and evolves the service to contribute measurable results to the business.

A proven set of best practices to implement ITSM is ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library). ITIL was developed by the U.K. government and has been used in Europe for many years, but is just now beginning to make inroads into the U.S. Designed to define and streamline IT services, ITIL’s practices were drawn from public and private sectors internationally. Both ITSM and ITIL are about efficiently and effectively leveraging IT to achieve desired business outcomes, but ITSM answers the question, “What do we want to do as an IT organization?” while ITIL is one way of addressing, “How are we going to do it?” ITIL and ITSM help IT organizations deliver IT services that are:

  • Cost-justifiable
  • High in quality and are measured, reported and reviewed regularly
  • Managed efficiently (best use of resources) and effectively (achieving the intended results)
  • Prioritized by activity relative to the business impact
  • Monitored for change so that change is controlled to minimize negative impact on services
  • Aligned to and drive business strategy

According to industry analysts, 80 percent of business processes are run on IT. Just as corporations are reinventing themselves to comply with new regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, so too has IT had to reinvent itself to become a disciplined organization whose activities are aligned with the business and result in direct, measurable business benefits. The first step in achieving this alignment is to understand how the business works. This is done by building process maps and defining business rules as necessary to document how the business flows value through the organization to its customers. Gaps and misalignments between business and IT are brought to light so that hardware and software can be realigned. The transformation process amounts to the building of a strategy-execution framework, both on the business side and the IT side.

The Role of Project Management

Traditionally, projects were spawned within IT. Today, a mature IT department does not implement upgrades and infrastructure projects unless there is a business advantage to doing so. Effective business management depends on successful IT projects, and the practices of project management and business analysis intensify the impact of ITIL. ITIL has a strong focus on managing changes to maximize benefit (business outcomes) while minimizing risk. Because changes are typically implemented as projects, project management is the foundation for successful integration of IT changes into the operational environment in a way that meets IT service quality and availability targets. Most organizations that are implementing ITSM/ITIL are tackling the challenge by addressing IT services piece by piece in order of importance. They are forming project teams and managing changes as projects so they can track the investment in new tools and processes.

Competency in project management is thus a vital contribution to realizing:

  • Lowered risk
  • Cost efficiencies
  • Ability to hit the planned/estimated scope, budget and schedule targets that underpinned the business case

In the past the project manager’s goal was to bring projects home on budget, on time and with the full scope. Now there is a fourth success criteria and expectation, which is that the business benefits were actually achieved with positive ROI. That means the business should have realized more in benefits than it spent to develop and operate the new solution. A challenge in this regard, particularly in decentralized companies, is that IT managers are often doing hands-on engineering work, as was customary with the 1970s reactive approach. Rather, they should be managing the work and allocating resources to the most valuable projects and activities.

The Role of Project Portfolio Management

The practice of project portfolio management is a form of IT governance. It ensures that IT is investing in the most valuable projects and allocating resources to projects in order of priority. Project teams that are performing strategic initiatives are resourced while trivial projects that consume resources without returning significant business benefits are back-logged.

Expect a learning curve with portfolio management/IT governance because the business is used to sending any kind of request to IT and having it fulfilled. Portfolio management encourages organizations to work collaboratively to establish a new structure for decision-making and prioritization of IT work that takes into account the benefits of projects all across the enterprise. This is a new leadership practice in the way changes are approved at the senior level. The transformation task at hand is daunting because of IT’s legacy of complexity. Practicing portfolio management to focus on the most strategic products and services first saves scarce resources, and keeps personnel from getting overwhelmed.

The Role of Business Analysis

According to a 2004 survey (The Standish Group, Third Quarter Research Report), 53 percent of IT projects in the U.S. were over time or over budget, 18 percent failed and only 29 percent succeeded. According to the Standish Group’s 2006 Chaos Report, little had changed: 46 percent of IT projects were over time or over budget; 19 percent failed and just 35 percent succeeded. Nearly two thirds of all projects failed or ran into trouble. The reason for the dubious success record of IT projects is that business analysis is not applied and maintained throughout application development and implementation.

Poor business analysis not only impacts business stakeholders, who don’t get what they paid for, but it also adversely affects project management. Poorly stated requirements prevent accurate estimation and effective resourcing. This in turns leads to poor application development and forces project managers to repeatedly re-initiate or even directly carry out requirements management activities to address deficiencies.

The primary responsibility for requirements’ management belongs to the business analyst (BA), as defined by the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA). While subject matter experts understand the language of requirements in their particular domains, the BA speaks both business and technical languages, but focuses exclusively on the business. He or she understands and owns the process through which requirements are translated from business strategy to successful solutions. The BA’s enterprise view of requirements management drives alignment through all levels of the organization.

Unfortunately many IT groups still insist that they do not need a BA because most of their projects are “technology projects” or “exclusively engineering.” Every project should derive from business needs. Therefore, every project’s decision-making process should be driven by a BA. Without a BA who focuses on the business case and makes sure there is a business benefit, the IT organization is not fulfilling its responsibility.

Culture Change for the New Millennium

IT can no longer function as a set of discrete tools supporting discrete business processes. Today, critical business processes are highly dependent on and integrated with IT; the two are essentially inseparable. IT assets need to be tightly focused on meeting the needs of internal customers, if organizations are to respond flexibly and quickly to markets, customer demands and regulatory obligations. In the early 21st century, a perfect storm is gathering to change the culture of IT, to govern investments in IT and to use IT as a competitive advantage to impact the bottom line. The challenge of the transformation is immensely complex and should not be undertaken without competent project management and business analysis.

Kathleen B. Hass, PMP is Senior Practice Consultant at Management Concepts, and Director at Large and Chapter Governance Committee chair for the International Institute of Business Analysis (www.theiiba.org). She is the author of Managing Complex Projects: A New Model (Management Concepts, October 2008). Since 1973, Management Concepts, headquartered in Vienna, VA, has been a global provider of training, consulting and publications in leadership and management development. Management Concepts is a Gold International Sponsor and an Endorsed Education Provider of IIBA. For further information, visit www.managementconcepts.com or call 703 790-9595.

The Project Manager as Salesperson

Written by Cynthia Low on . Posted in Articles. 6 Comments on The Project Manager as Salesperson

One of my own mentors told me a very long time ago, “You don’t like selling? Too bad ‘cause you’re either you’re either gonna be selling to them or they’ll be selling to you.”

There is a disdain for salespeople among many who think of themselves in more of an engineering context. However, my experience in the project management industry has shown my mentor’s comments to be more often true than not. As project managers we are going to need to sell our story often and in many different ways. Here are just a few project management sales opportunities:

Selling Yourself as the Project Manager

Audience: The PMO, Senior Management and/or the Client
Before the project even begins, you’ll need to convince someone that you’re the right person for the job. Do you have the experience for this kind of project? Do you have a resume of the skills and particular contribution you can make if they put you in charge? What about the resources you’ll need when you take on the job? Are you ready to make a pitch to management for the particular tools, or assistance, or people you might require? This is your chance to sell that idea to management!

Selling the Proposal for Approval

Audience: The Steering Committee
You’ve got the project but is it a project yet? If your organization does project portfolio management, then perhaps not. Many organizations use a stage-gating system that starts before projects get very far. Are you ready to make the case for your proposal to become a project? Have you got a business case that lists the Return on Investment, the Strategic Alignment of the goals of this project with those of the organization? Do you know how your proposal compares to others you may be up against? How can you make your project look like the most attractive to the steering committee that needs to approve it.

While we’re talking about this kind of salesmanship, we should add the same for each and every stage-gate that the project will encounter. You’ll need to present more than a bar chart to get your project through the gate and into the next stage, and that may mean preparing materials and a presentation to show why you’re ready to move to the next level at each review.

Selling the Budget

Audience: Senior Management
Ok, you’ve got the project, but do you have the resources? This is one of the most fundamental challenges for project managers and a remarkable percentage of project managers aren’t ready to make a case for the money they need. Are you? Do you have the backup research to say why you need each and every penny that’s in your budget? How about a trade-off spreadsheet of less money equals less features equals less return on investment? It’s an easy tool to understand and very few project managers think of doing it. I’ll put selling the scope of the project and the timeline into this same category although you might have to make separate pitches for each.

Selling the Project for Resourcing

Audience: Potential team members and Team/Department Leaders
It’s a miracle! You’ve sold management on your project and you’ve got the money you asked for and a schedule you can live with. Now who will actually do the project? Can you attract the best team members? Can you lobby the key skilled resources you’ll need? How about the team leaders who might be in charge of those resources? Have you thought of how you’ll pitch it to them to get that particularly key resource? What’s in it for them? Why will your project need that person and how will that help the organization as a whole?

Selling any Variance or Change Management

Audience: The Client
As you’ll know if you’ve read any of my articles in the past, my favorite project management quote is from Napoleon Bonaparte who said “A battle plan lasts until contact with the enemy.” That’s almost always true on a project. When you do get some variance or there is a request for a change of scope, are you ready to pitch the idea to make the change to the client? Perhaps what would be best is pitching the client to not make the change. Do you have the materials, the logic, the presentation slides and the story that’s easy to understand and ready to deliver? Perhaps it’s a time-to-market vs. feature-rich trade-off analysis. Whatever it is, it’ll need to be easy to graph and easy to absorb.

Selling the End-Product

Audience: The Client and/or End Users
Hurray! Your project is finished. Or so you think. I can’t tell you how many project managers get to the end of the project only to find the client reluctant to accept what was created. “But we made what you asked for,” says the project manager. The client doesn’t see it that way and the project manager isn’t ready to sell the end result to the client. Are you? Have you been getting the client ready for what they’re about to receive? Have you got materials that you can provide for sign-off, for the benefits that they’re about to get? I’ll include here selling Phase 2 of the project because it often happens at client sign-off.

Selling Yourself as the Project Manager for the Next Project

Audience: The PMO and/or Senior Management
Finally, when the project is over are you ready to sell management on how great a job you did so you can get onto the next great project? Did you collect data along the way of what you accomplished as a project manager and how you made a difference? A lessons-learned document that gets widely distributed is a great tool for this. Share your lessons with others but don’t forget to point out the things that worked along with what didn’t. It’s a wonderful opportunity to explain the system you created or the tools you shared with other team members.

Regardless of what part of the project management cycle you’re in, the chances that you’ll need to do some sales work as a project manager are almost inevitable. Do you have the tools and the skills? Here are a few that I often find lacking when I interview potential project managers and even independent consult ants:

Presentation Software

Whether it’s the ubiquitous PowerPoint or other presentation software I’m always stunned at the horrible quality of slide presentations. Projected presentations are a fact of life. If you don’t have the graphics and design skills to make your own unique templates, look for some online. There are thousands of free templates and a low-cost investment in PresentationPro or other template warehouse is worth its weight in gold. While I’m talking about presentations, learn not just how to use your presentation software but also some basic functionality of graphics software such as PaintShop Pro so you can capture and insert corporate logos or screen shots or pictures of the project.

Public Speaking

I spent about 10 solid years of being trained in public speaking and while that’s more than most people do, I talk to an incredible number of project managers who’ve spent no time at all. If you can’t speak in front of a small or even mid-sized group, you’re always going to be handicapped as a project manager. There are great training courses that are not tremendously expensive. Join Toastmasters or Dale Carnegie or just look online but get a professional to give you some basic speaking and voice lessons!

Word Processing Skills and Document Writing

A project manager has to be able to write a proposal or business analysis report. Expecting that the spell and grammar checker on your word processor will do all the work for you is a fantasy. I see a remarkable number of documents that are terribly formatted, poorly written and just plain hard to understand. If writing is not your thing, you can sign up for a business writing class at your local college. And, for goodness’ sake, learn the basics of your word processing package!

Even for skilled project managers, there are a few sales tools that you might not often think of but that can be invaluable. Here are just a few that I see project managers collect very infrequently but that are incredibly impressive when used appropriately:

Data Collected along the Way

Project managers who collect data along the way always do better at presenting it. If you are thinking ahead to your next presentation then the more empirical data you have available, the more convincing you’ll be when making your sales pitch are.

Competitive Advantage

It is inevitable that, when you are selling one of the opportunities described above, the people to whom you are presenting will be looking at what you’re presenting in the context of alternatives. It’s very powerful to have thought in advance of what those alternatives are so you can present the competitive advantages. You don’t need to talk about the alternatives such as other projects. But, you can still talk about those aspects of your project that would compare well against others.

Competitive Benefits

Aside from advantages, one perspective that even trained sales people often forget are the competitive benefits. If you think of not just the advantages of your project over another, but also the benefits that the organization will realize in your proposal vs. another, you’ll already be head and shoulders above whoever else is presenting.

Surveys

There are so many free survey sites such as Zoomerang online but so few project managers use them. I’ve seen experienced project managers leap ahead by collecting survey results. The surveys might be for feature comparisons, interface element selections, timing or prioritization by clients or users. I saw a fabulous survey done once just for icon selection within a software project. Surveys don’t take a huge amount of effort but their results can make a very big impression!

Whatever the project, you are bound to run into some situation where you’ll need to become a project manager salesperson. Learning the sales tools and skills even at an elementary level can make the difference between a successful project and one that’s less so.

So – get out there and do some selling!

 

Chris Vandersluis is the founder and president of HMS Software based in Montreal, Canada. He has an economics degree from Montreal’s McGill University and over 22 years experience in the automation of project control systems. He is a long-standing member of both the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the American Association of Cost Engineers (AACE) and is the founder of the Montreal Chapter of the Microsoft Project Association. Mr. Vandersluis has been published in numerous publications including Fortune Magazine, Heavy Construction News, the Ivey Business Journal, PMI’s PMNetwork and Computing Canada. Mr. Vandersluis has been part of the Microsoft Enterprise Project Management Partner Advisory Council since 2003. He teaches Advanced Project Management at McGill University’s Executive Institute. He can be reached at [email protected].

Just do it!

Written by Claude Emond on . Posted in Articles. 8 Comments on Just do it!

Implementing best practices and promoting best behaviours on the projects you manage.

For many years now, I have been giving customized project management workshops for various public and private organisations. Most of these organisations had, when they started these workshops, a low maturity level in project management, as defined by OPM3 or similar models. Most of the things I promote in those workshops, the contents of which are validated with customer representatives, just did not exist formally in these organisations when I started this training. Still now, more often than not, those who take these workshops go back and try to apply project management processes and tools that are unknown to their organisation as a whole, hence in an environment that has, apparently, no structure in place to support them.

Because of this lack of formal organisational structure, some workshop participants tell me that they are waiting for their organisation to promulgate the project management policies and put into place the processes, structures, practices, tools and incentive systems to support the use of the knowledge and skills I am coaching them to develop as habits. What I then answer to them is based both on my own experience and on what I have seen happening in most organisations where project managers do what they are supposed to do voluntarily. My answer is: You believe this project management stuff is necessary to the success of your projects and good for your organisation, do not wait for anybody’s permission! Just do it!

After the 250 participants mark in a series of workshops I am involved with, the customer, a world class organisation, made a survey to see what was happening with this training/coaching program? Were there any measurable benefits? What was found was the following:

  • Although not supported by formal organisational elements, two out of three participants (67 %) were actively using the knowledge and skills they had acquired in the workshops. They considered it helped them deliver better projects, with added satisfaction for their team and themselves.
  • The managers of those participants, using their new knowledge and skills, said unanimously that these persons had improved their performance in project mode significantly. Although they did not understand the processes and practices used (they had not been trained and there is no official project management elements in place), they valued the results so much that they asked for these workshops to be given to more resources in the organisation

Those participants, who did not wait for their organisation to give them official directives to apply their new knowledge and skills, found out rapidly that they still were able to create additional value for their organisation through the projects they delivered; and they were rewarded for this. They found out, like I did before them on the projects I managed, that you do not need the permission of anybody to act appropriately on your projects. Actually, the organisation that did this survey has continued to organise these workshops. I am up to 500 people trained/coached and still going at it. The organisation has still to put in place official processes to score better in maturity level with OPM3 and the like. Nonetheless, the maturity is increasing any time a new workshop participant just goes out there and applies what he has learned, because he believes doing so is necessary to the success of the projects he has to manage.

Lately, in one of these workshops, a participant kept repeating that he was waiting for his organisation to give him directives to use what I was teaching them. I simply told him that he was seeing it the wrong way. I told him that if his organisation had permitted him to take this workshop (a 4-day effort spread over four weeks), there was a reason for it. The organisation was now waiting for him to apply his new knowledge and skills to show the way to others.

The message was clear, his organisation was telling him: JUST DO IT!

Presentation: Leadership Skills for the Technical Professional

Written by Mike Morton on . Posted in Articles. 9 Comments on Presentation: Leadership Skills for the Technical Professional

“Over 70 percent of all technical professionals have to be leaders. This is today’s business world reality.”Richard Lannon of BraveWorld Inc.

You are a successful technical professional. Now you need to make the transition from technical specialist to leader. That transition can be a real challenge. You must be a communicator, motivator, organizer, evaluator, and builder of people and teams. Our business lives require us to be leaders and to build our skills. Our people and teams need us and we need them. “Leadership Skills for the Technical Professional” is about building the skills that you need to succeed.

Presentation Details:
Speaker: Richard Lannon of BraveWorld Inc. www.braveworld.ca
Length: Approximately 55 Minutes

“Over 70 percent of all technical professionals have to be leaders. This is today’s business world reality.” Richard Lannon of BraveWorld Inc.

You are a successful technical professional. Now you need to make the transition from technical specialist to leader. That transition can be a real challenge. You must be a communicator, motivator, organizer, evaluator, and builder of people and teams. Our business lives require us to be leaders and to build our skills. Our people and teams need us and we need them. “Leadership Skills for the Technical Professional” is about building the skills that you need to succeed.

Presentation Details:
Speaker: Richard Lannon of BraveWorld Inc. www.braveworld.ca
Length: Approximately 55 Minutes

To Play this presentation – click on the arrow button below.
To enlargen the presentation size – click on the magnifying glass button below.

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Can EPM Evolve Out of the Sum of the Parts?

Written by Cynthia Low on . Posted in Articles. 7 Comments on Can EPM Evolve Out of the Sum of the Parts?

It’s all the rage these days to talk about creating an enterprise project management environment with a centralized, highly structured system. But there’s more than one path to an EPM system and it may be that you already have the means to a powerful
system at your fingertips.

Instead of thinking of a list of great features that are available in some of the more popular EPM packages, let’s think about what it is we want to do with the system.

First of all, it’s almost a guarantee that project management is already underway. Project management is hardly new. If you’re in an organization that delivers projects regardless of whether they’re internal or external, you almost certainly have some kind of project management going on. What do we need to do in a modern project management environment?

Scheduling

Well, one of the most obvious things is to create a schedule. A structured list of what you’ve got to accomplish broken down into measureable tasks is a huge step forward in our enterprise project management system. “But wait!” I hear you say. “How is that ‘enterprise’? You’re right, so let’s put enterprise access to our project schedules on our list of challenges we must meet.

Resource Management

Every project gets accomplished by people. So it would follow that it’s important to have some kind of resource management plan. For many organizations, resource capacity planning across all resources is one of the most powerful reasons to design, purchase and deploy an EPM package. So, let’s put that on our list of challenges we’d need to overcome with whatever solution we come up with.

Project Progress and Timesheets

Timesheets have become such a challenging area for project management environments that some kind of timesheet or task statusing functionality is now virtually always required in an EPM package. Let’s add this requirement into our list of things we’ll need in our EPM system.

Communication

These days, communication and collaboration are a huge aspect of successful project management. This can include everything from ensuring the team members are able to communicate with each other to ensuring that announcements, a calendar of events and other key information pieces are disseminated to all team members in a timely fashion. Let’s get communication and collaboration into our list too.

Document Management

This has become a significant point of leverage for making a project environment effective and to eliminate risks. In fact, while we’re at it, let’s add managing lists of issues, decisions, deadlines, risks as well as contract and design documents in here.

That’s quite a list of challenges and virtually all the brochures and marketing collateral of the EPM software vendors speak to these challenges directly. Any sane person would obviously run out to purchase one of these systems right away, wouldn’t you? While the answer for some organizations is certainly, yes, as I’ve often said, deploying a true EPM package requires a pretty significant management commitment, and a bunch of effort.

Well, instead of doing that, let’s see if we can make this vehicle out of the parts lying around the shop. Let’s take each of the challenges above and see what tools might be commonly available for us to use.

Scheduling. Tthe obviously solution is to ask what project management desktop tools are already in use in the organization. Microsoft says there are over 20 million copies of Microsoft Project sold and that’s a lot of Critical Path Methodology analysis available. Now our requirement above stated that we want to make the list of tasks available to others in the organization, but there are many ways to access Microsoft Project data. First of all, a print out of certain reports could be done to an Adobe Acrobat (PDF) file. This file could then be made available on the corporate Intranet as a report to be read or even printed out by anyone. In fact, with Microsoft Project 2007, we could also create a Visual report in Excel which could then be saved as an HTML web file. This could even be automated from within Project as a Macro. With a bit more work, the list of tasks could be saved from Excel into a SharePoint list and, using SharePoint, you could deliver automated email alerts for any changes in the schedule right to the Email Inbox of each resource.

Resource Management. Resource Management is a trickier conversation until you take a step back and look at what is driving resource constraints. In high-tech, white collar projects (like IT or R&D) typically we schedule resources right down to the named person. This is because the skills of each person in the organization are virtually unique. And yet, if we look at a resource pool of, say, 100 people, typically all the resource constraints can be narrowed down to a tiny group of key resources of perhaps four or five people. I’ve been doing this a long time and the number of key resources even in a very large pool rarely exceeds a dozen people. When you start looking at how projects work, all work revolves around the schedule of these key people. Take a look in your own organization and see if this is true. Are the bottlenecks within a small group? If this is so, here’s a radical idea: Just manage the key resources. Create a small project that has just the tasks of your four, five or six key people and manage that. Let the supervisors and everyone else work around that schedule and leave the scheduling of everyone else to team leads. This almost always works and it tends to work very, very, very quickly. Using this technique can bring relief to a constrained organization within a day or two in most cases. You can publish this project just like we described above and there’s very little analysis required. After all, resource leveling individuals doesn’t make much sense. They’re going to work 8 hours a day every day.

Project Progress and Timesheets. This one’s a little tougher. If you’re just looking to progress the tasks, your project managers can get a good read on this in regular weekly task updates. But, if you need to track the time for other purposes such as billing, R&D tax claims, payroll, activity based costing etc. then it’s possible you may need to go out to look for a commercial timesheet system. If you do, look for one of the several timesheets that link directly to desktop tools like Microsoft Project or Primavera or Open Plan or whatever desktop tool you’ve got already.

Communication. There is a plethora of freeware portal and collaboration tools out there but one of the most obvious is Windows SharePoint Services. It comes free with Windows Server 2003 or higher and has all kinds of core capacity for managing lists, calendars, alerts and more. In fact, the free portal software would be a great place to publish the schedules in PDF or Excel/HTML formats that we talked about earlier.
Once it’s up and running, maintenance of SharePoint is pretty reasonable.

Document Management. SharePoint also includes document management capabilities, and if we look at the list of things we also wanted to manage here, issues are a list, risks are a list, deadlines are a list of events. It’s true that Microsoft Office Project Server includes these lists already formatted within SharePoint but for a bit of work you can create these lists yourself. If you need a little more in the area of document management, you can always look at one of the document management packages on the market or you could enhance your Windows SharePoint Services to include some basic workflow.

This approach of creating your EPM system out of the parts available to you isn’t appropriate for everyone. You’ll need to balance the benefits of having little change in the tools people use against the benefits that would come from a complete overhaul of the project management process and tools, and the enhanced capacity of working with a large centralized tool. But that being said, you’ve also got to balance the reduced cost of using tools that are already in use within the organization against the challenge of changing a corporate culture, and the user resistance that can result, when a large centralized tool is deployed.

So, can you make a car out of parts? Of course you can. They do it in Detroit every day.

Chris Vandersluis is the founder and president of HMS Software based in Montreal, Canada. He has an economics degree from Montreal’s McGill University and over 22 years experience in the automation of project control systems. He is a long-standing member of both the Project Management Institute (PMI) and the American Association of Cost Engineers (AACE) and is the founder of the Montreal Chapter of the Microsoft Project Association. Mr. Vandersluis has been published in numerous publications including Fortune Magazine, Heavy Construction News, the Ivey Business Journal, PMI’s PMNetwork and Computing Canada. Mr. Vandersluis has been part of the Microsoft Enterprise Project Management Partner Advisory Council since 2003. He teaches Advanced Project Management at McGill University’s Executive Institute. He can be reached at chrisv@hmssoftware.