Trends in Project Management Systems
Over the past few years, the project management software industry has gone through a major culture change as fundamental as the introduction of the first project management software systems back in the 1960s.
The changes in the last 15 years in computer hardware and user interfaces such as Microsoft’s Windows have made the type of software available in the project management industry radically different from earlier generations of this software.
Within the next few paragraphs, we’ll take a look at the trends of project management software development over the past few years and then take a look into the future to see what we can expect in the years to come.
The Way It Was
If we consider the history of project management systems, it is only a few years ago that the only project management software available was on centralized, large mainframes or minicomputers.
These systems were expensive, cumbersome, and very complex. They required teams of experienced operators and this made such systems viable only for the largest of companies or most complex of mega-projects.
It’s hard to remember sometimes but we’ve only had PCs for about 12 years. In the eighties, the computer revolution that brought desktop computing to so many business people affected the project management software industry dramatically.
In the early eighties, virtually hundreds of project management systems appeared. Each is designed with the desktop user in mind.
This followed the Information Systems industry generally as I/S managers watched different automated environments decentralize onto many individual’s computers.
Project Management software like Timeline and Super project suddenly were able to bring project management systems to the desks of companies and projects that previously would have been unable to even consider such systems.
We credit these early easy-to-use systems with revolutionizing how corporate North America considers project management.
Concepts that had remained the domain of those highly-skilled, rarefied project teams or project departments were now loose in the public domain.
Managers who never would have known what they were asking, for now, could drum up requests for “Gantt Charts” or “Resource Histograms.”
With the advent of Local Area Networks and increased connectivity in the mid-eighties, the project management industry went through yet another twist.
Suddenly multi-user systems and the ability to manage multiple projects or complex project environments had come to the PC world.
Products like Primavera and Open Plan appeared where only mainframe or mini-computer software could have been considered before.
Even mega-projects such as the development of Boeing’s new 777 aircraft, the Super-Collider, or NASA’s Space Station were being scheduled on PC-based systems such as these.
Project Management Systems Today
As Local Area Network technology has stabilized and really come into its own we are beginning to see yet another phase in the demand for project management systems.
New demands from businesses for “database standards”, Wide Area Networks, and even a higher degree of connectivity herald a desire from the project management community to begin working as a workgroup or a project team.
This movement brings back the notion of integrated systems — a common buzzword in the computing industry these days.
What does project management systems integration mean to companies where project management is mission critical? Many people are not sure.
The first notion is that compatibility or using the same software must make one an integrated company. We’ve found many firms where this simply doesn’t work. First of all, people confuse the notion of integrating their data with integrating functionality.
This often means that a company standardizes on one project management system in order to integrate but then finds that the system is either too complex or too simple for all the users in the organization.
The result is attrition from the selected system by different users. In our work with companies across the country, we often find companies with three, four, or five systems in use by different groups.
Choosing systems that are designed to be data-integrable but also designed for different types of users might be a better choice.
That means an easy-to-use graphical user interface system for some users and a more complex high-end system for others.
An ability to move data easily between these products without any loss of data on the way would be a must.
What Is To Come
Over the next few years, you can expect this trend to continue even further. Recent advances in connectivity of desktop systems have had an enormous effect on the way companies work today.
Combined with the trends in project groups towards “Global Project Teams”, “Outsourcing”, and “Empowerment of Employees”, these changes must be felt in the project management systems of tomorrow.
Even now with electronic mail and interconnectivity of mail systems, there is less and less regard for the geographic location of your workgroup. They may be down the hall, across town, or around the world.
They may be part of your company or part of a sub-contractor or outsourcing company. While doing my e-mail today I was able to send a message to my colleagues in my own workgroup.
Two of them are in England, one in France, six in Houston, two in Washington, two in Los Angeles, one in Australia, and four in Montreal. When composing my e-mail I didn’t give their location a second thought.
I know they won’t either when composing their replies. Look for future project management systems to become “mail-enabled.” This will put these systems into the same category as “workgroup” applications and rightly so.
Project management is the ideal workgroup application. This might allow users to automatically update their co-workers with the status of the project by electronic mail with no human intervention whatsoever.
A rules-based/electronic mail-enabled project management system might, for example, automatically send a message to the manager when a part of the project was late and would include with the message the pertinent data directly from the project. That data might come in the form of a table, a list, a picture of a network, or a bar chart.
The manager could then review the problem and resend authorization for a particular action back to the system via e-mail again. The system could then proceed with the authorized action all without the intervention of the user.
Trends in database connectivity in the software industry such as SQL or ODBC compliant databases will force project management software vendors to “open” their database architecture to the users.
This may make for a dramatic change in what is possible with a project management system. With the ability to link directly with the system’s database, a whole host of additional systems can be tied together.
Users would now be able to link their project management system directly with their accounting systems, a timesheet system, material controls, and Executive Information Systems.
This is currently possible only with high-end systems that have an open architecture database.
Future trends in the integrability of applications through environments such as OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) let different applications share data and objects with each other.
This might allow a user of a project management system to place a piece of a project display directly into a word processing document or, alternately, to put a picture of the project directly onto a project report.
Project management software will have to move toward this type of technology over the next couple of years.
The final chapter of this article is yet to be written. Trends in computer systems and interfaces change almost daily and the pace of the changes has increased as well.
Choosing a system that you hope to maintain for several years probably means putting a heavier significance on the system’s level of flexibility and adaptability to its environment.
Project management software has been at the forefront of computer technology since the early days of computers some forty years ago. One trend that project managers can count on is that it will continue to stay at that leading edge in the years to come.
