One of the questions we get from readers is how to select a project management software system. I mean, when you get right to it, what should that process look like? Where do you begin?
The first step that most people take is to bring up Google and begin an immediate search for project management software. That is all fine and good if you simply want to educate yourself and what is available in the marketplace. But you will quickly become overwhelmed, and you will not know what to look for if you do not first complete some initial tasks in preparation.
We recommend that you first determine your objectives, as you would any other project. What are you trying to accomplish? Why now? What does success look like? What strategic objectives is the organization trying to accomplish and how will this system fit into that?
This is important because if you do not have any measure of success, you won't be successful.
Here are some examples of possible objectives.
A product development company may be struggling with properly scheduling and maintaining customer commitments. Their objectives may be 1) create a central location where everyone can see current project schedules to reduce data collection time and misinformation; 2) make current project and resource assignment information readily available to make better, more informed promises to customers on new projects; 3) give salespeople information to know how their projects are progressing, and thus keep the customer informed; 4) develop an alert system to identify important items that are "falling through the cracks".
A professional services company (such as a company that does customer implementations) may have similar but also different objectives: 1) create a central location to show all active customer engagements; 2) create an issue management system to identify and track important issues with customer projects; 3) create an easy system to collect billable and non-billable hours worked by associates, thus reducing manually intensive operations; 4) automate the process of reporting for customer billing and informational purposes.
One of our government clients that utilizes EnterPlicity PM Software offers a unique and value-added service to other government agencies. But they had no hard data to back up what they really did (which made audits tough), and they needed to change to become more effective and even competitive (yes they have to compete). Their first objective was simply to find out where people were spending their time: which projects, deliverables, and deliverable types.
Other organizations may want to automate key processes in a workflow setting to be more productive, combine systems, stop things from falling through the cracks, centralize project management information to enable faster and more informed decision making, etc.
Document and prioritize these objectives. You will probably not be able to accomplish them all at once. You may need to go in phases. What is strategically more important and focus on that in the first phase. But have all of your objectives documented and in mind for future use during your evaluation.
This will be a working document meaning it will change over time as your business conditions and strategic situation changes.
Next: part 2...
