One item that I would like to address is the people side of a project management software implementation. After all, it is the people who will make it successful or not - the people who are managing, using, training, implementing, and analyzing data from the software.



First, my apologies for the long delay in posts. Sometimes you have those crazy months and this last one was one of those. Last week I was at a conference and visiting clients. We were also a sponsor of the PMI chapters in Washington, DC and New York City (Manhattan). It was very interesting and a lot of fun. Thank you to those I personally met and talked with in those meetings. I hope that those of you in New York City had fun with our "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" presentation of EnterPlicity.

Now on to the people side of things. I am not going to convey my own information to you as much as pass on something that I read on this topic. There was a blog entry posted by Donald Seers yesterday on eWeek on Project Managers and whether or not they are too focused on technology and tasks vs. people. Project management software can be a great value-added tool to help an organization gain competitive advantage. I would almost go so far as to say that organizations in certain industries / markets need to have a tool such as this to stay competitive. I believe that gone are the days where late schedules, poor resource management, inefficient project management, etc. are acceptable. Too many organizations (aka competitors) are at least working towards getting past these obstacles. Most of these organizations are utilizing project management software. The successful organizations are marrying project management software with the right processes and discipline.

Which brings us to our point. The software in and of itself is not enough. You cannot just throw software out there and expect it to be successful and be adopted. There is both a process and a people side to it. We have talked in this blog about the importance of setting objectives, planning, training, buy-in, etc. to a successful implementation. You should also factor in the people side. You have to build relationships with people. Fundamentally those one on one relationships are really going to help (or hurt) your implementation effort.

Read the article by Donald Seers here:
http://blogs.eweek.com/careers/content001/leadership/are_project_managers_too_focused_on_technology.html

Donald references an article on CIO:
http://www.cio.com/article/502263/Project_Management_How_IT_and_Business_Relationships_Shape_Success?page=1