 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
| |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
| |
|
Project management |
 |
Peter Worlock looks at the tools that can help you manage anything from a single project to a whole portfolio of projects. |
|
|
On time, on budget or to spec: choose any two. The old joke almost perfectly defines project management software – except, of course, that the goal is to deliver on all three.
Project management (PM) as a discipline is perhaps as old as civilization - the pharaohs must have used something like it for pyramid construction – but by the mid-twentieth century, with the notions of critical path analysis, time-and-motion studies and task-specific production lines, it was well refined. And it was one of the first application software categories, along with the word processor, spreadsheet and database, to follow the rise of the personal computer.
At that time, project management was largely the domain of large-scale construction projects such as the building of airports, involving thousands of workers, tons of concrete and miles of electrical cable; while software development was largely small-scale, involving one or two blokes, a few thousands of lines of code, and a lot of caffeinated drinks. Today, airport building is no simpler but software development has grown to similar levels of complexity and forms one of the main markets for project management tools. Here we look at the solutions in general but with a particular focus on software development.
Issues and challenges
The important word in understanding project management software is ‘project’. We can define a project as a discreet event having a start date and a deadline, an allocation of staff, money and other resources, and which results in something that did not previously exist - regardless of whether that ‘something’ is an airport, a new chocolate bar or a software application. This definition also explains what a project is not: it is not the stuff that your organisation does every day; the on-going business of business. Selling chocolate is not a project: creating a new chocolate bar for the Christmas market is.
This apparent pedantry is important for a number of reasons. First, there are a number of vendors offering ‘project management’ solutions that won’t help you manage a project. They might more accurately be called resource, time or customer management.
Second, a vital part of any project is the definition of goals, deliverables and metrics. If you find yourself managing a non-project such as ‘sell more chocolate’ or ‘improve that software’ then the goals, metrics and deliverables will be vague, hard to define and impossible to deliver.
Third, the concept at the heart of project management is the direct coupling between time, budget, resources and specification, and the fact that any change to one aspect of the project has direct ramifications for others. This is most clearly seen in the physical construction projects that were the birthplace of project management. You can’t erect the walls until the foundations are in; you can’t pour the foundations without the concrete; the concrete can’t be delivered until the access road is built. Indeed there are several PM applications that are still very much focused on construction, such as Asta PowerProject.
In the realm of software development, you can most commonly substitute people for resources. Instead of concrete and cable you need designers and coders and testers and documentation writers. If you’re running late and your testers get pulled to another project, the results can be just as disastrous as a lack of concrete to an airport construction.
Software solutions
While there are many Project Management applications available that don’t really fit the bill, it’s worth bearing in mind that they may be adequate for your needs. If your projects are relatively simple or small-scale, or you simply need help with one particular aspect such as scheduling or budgeting, you may not want a full-featured PM solution. Indeed, you can do a lot of project management in Microsoft Excel – or without any software at all.
For certain industries or applications, specialised software may include PM tools within the overall feature set. In marketing, CRM, print publishing and software development, project management is such an integral aspect of the job that the leading software solutions may provide enough features to make a standalone PM system unnecessary.
However, for bigger projects, either because of size, complexity or mission-critical nature, PM software can be vital. True project management solutions will offer dedicated tools in at least three specific areas:
Scheduling: Common challenges in your project will include the availability of people to work on certain tasks, and the resources they will need at those times. More complexity arises when one task depends on the completion of others, and certain tasks must be completed to meet fixed deadlines. Useful tools in this area include Gantt charts and PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) diagrams, which show project schedules in graphical form. At a simpler level, such charting forms the heart of software such as PERT Chart Expert from Critical Tools, Mindjet JVCGantt Pro and Kidasa’s Milestones series.
Managing: Any PM software worth the name will provide templates or wizards for setting up a model of your project that includes timescales, deadlines, available staff and resources. In any project there will be a series of events that are mutually dependent and that directly determine the overall length of the project. PM software will identify these ‘critical paths’ and help to optimise them. Project Kickstart and Microsoft Office Project are good examples.
Communicating: The software should produce task lists and resource allocation schedules, highlight project progress by comparing actual and planned performance, and issue alerts and warnings of risks and shortfalls. Depending on your requirements, you may want software that generates reports and circulates them to team members automatically, or which makes such information readily available to the project leader.
Deployment model
In addition to considering potential software solutions by complexity or by feature set, it is also possible to consider the deployment model. The most familiar case is the standalone application installed on a single computer, and most of the simpler solutions follow this model. For more complex projects – or more complex software – server-based solutions are common, and increasingly since the rise of the Internet and the Web, many are designed to be accessed through the Web as much as through the organisation’s own network.
These different models offer different strengths and weaknesses. The standalone solution can be more complex to install since a copy must reside on the computer of every user, whereas server or Web-based solutions often require a single installation. The latter group can also be simpler to use on the client side since access is often through a familiar browser and offers simpler functionality. Web and server-based systems also encourage and facilitate collaboration and communication, while standalone software can hinder these important functions.
Finally, a new category of PM solutions has emerged in recent years. Known as Project Portfolio Management (PPM), it is aimed at larger organisations managing a multitude of projects simultaneously, particularly where staff and resources are shared between different projects at different times. Largely above and beyond traditional project management, PPM tools are applicable at the enterprise management level, designed not so much to answer the question, “How do we complete this project?” but “Given our financial and strategic goals, should we do this project at all?”
Microsoft Office Project
Neatly, Microsoft’s family of project management tools illustrates and embodies almost all of these issues. Originally launched as a DOS product in 1984, Project almost perfectly exemplifies the development of the market for PM tools. The standalone version, Microsoft Office Project, is the market leader, even though it has never been part of any Office suite, and introduced many of the key features of the category, including dependency lines which show in graphical form which parts of the project cannot begin until other parts have been completed.
Microsoft Office Project gives you at-a-glance visibility of project stages,
resources, timelines and dependencies. The Gantt Chart to the right is a key
feature of project management software.
Fulfilling the demand for multi-user functionality, Microsoft extended standalone Project with Microsoft Office Project Server which stores project data in a central database and introduces collaboration tools and centralised resource management. Microsoft Office Project can now be used either as a standalone application or as a feature-rich client to Project Server. These capabilities were used in 2008 by a major European telecommunications manufacturer which implemented Project Server 2007 to add a coordination layer for multiple development teams (all existing Project users) at its Copenhagen development centre.
With the rise of the Internet, Microsoft again extended the family with the introduction of Microsoft Office Project Web Access. As the name suggests, this provides access to Project Server databases through the Internet and also functions as both a thin client and a remote administration tool.
Each release of the Project family has built on its integration with other Office applications, working closer with the scheduling and communications features in Outlook, PowerPoint for presentations, and the charting and diagramming features in Excel and Visio.
In the most recent version, Microsoft added portfolio management with the introduction of Office Project Portfolio Server as part of the Office Enterprise Project Management Solution. PPS 2007 is designed for enterprise and other large organisations who need to standardise governance processes, consolidate business investments, evaluate and prioritise competing projects, and select projects that “best align with the organisation’s business strategy”. That feature set helped Microsoft’s EPM system win a major contract with one of the UK’s largest local authorities where integration with the PRINCE2 management methodology, and the ability to implement project portfolio management, were key considerations.
While Project Portfolio Server may be of interest only to the very largest organisations, the Project family does provide the option to cherry-pick the components of most interest to businesses of different sizes and types. This is an unusual feature: while competing products can provide similar functionality, few if any can provide the seamless upgrade path from entry-level for the single user to distributed multi-user functionality for very large scale projects.
The Project family also has unique attractions for software development projects.
Visual Studio Team System
Recent versions of Visual Studio integrate with dedicated tools from the Microsoft
family. The ‘Publish to Project Server’ button ties this software project to the
multi-user functionality of Project Sever.
We noted above that some aspects of project management are so vital to the software development process that leading tools often boast specific functionality in this area. Microsoft’s own Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) is a good example. Among its design goals were tools to promote collaboration and communication, and to provide insight into project status so as to improve real-time decision making.
With the addition of Team Foundation Server the latest version goes even further down the route of project management with support for source code and version control, work item tracking and automatic notifications of key events. Moreover, VSTS can be integrated with Microsoft Office Project itself. Project managers can design an itemised list of work items, assign those work items to developers and track them using Project Professional.
A final piece of the project management puzzle arrived with the launch of Project Server which offered the chance to collaborate and manage projects that spanned multiple teams, regardless of geographical location. The missing link was Microsoft Project Server 2007 – VSTS Connector which made it possible to synchronise tasks between VSTS and Project Server, allowing project managers to monitor and manage the workflow between the two environments.
Once you’ve published a VSTS project to Project Server, team leaders have
instant access to key status indicators and performance metrics through a
dashboard-style interface.
In addition to task synchronisation, the Connector automates the tracking of progress and allows VSTS to act as a client to Project Server without the need for tools such as Project Web Access. It also allows for automatic communications, providing updates and alerts to project managers as team members make changes to the project.
In the longer term, Microsoft has committed to further integration between VSTS, Team Foundation Server and Project Server, to the extent that the next version of TFS (previously codenamed Rosario) will remove the need for the Connector. For the immediate future, however, the Connector makes it possible to build a project management environment that fully supports the features of both VSTS and Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management.
Whichever route you choose, you can be assured that there is a solution that will meet your requirements. If your projects are few and small in scale, you might find that an Excel spreadsheet and its ability to generate Gantt charts (or the charting features of a dedicated application) might be all you need.
This may also be true for smaller-scale software development teams where the built-in features of VSTS and its integration with Excel and Outlook offer a surprisingly powerful Project Management solution. As your projects get bigger and more complex, and your resources grow to meet them, so too do the available solutions. From one project to a portfolio, from a standalone application to distributed Web-delivered systems, you can get there not only on time, but also on budget and to spec.
|
|
PETER WORLOCK
Peter Worlock has been a journalist and author for 30 years, and has written about the IT industry for more than two decades. As an antidote he is currently learning the mysteries of woodworking without the use of machines.
peterw@hardcopymag.com
|
|
|
Find out more...
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
Copyright © 1983-2010 Grey Matter Ltd. All rights reserved. |
 |
|
 |
|
|