Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at andy.jordan@roffensian.com. Andy’s new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
Despite the fact I (and many others) have been writing and speaking for years about the need for PMOs to focus on delivering business benefits and ensuring projects earn value for the organization, the areas I am asked most about when it comes to PMOs haven’t changed: people, process and tools.
I understand why, on a day-to-day basis, these are still the mechanical elements that the PMO can influence to support project delivery—and in many cases, organizational leadership hasn’t yet got past those elements as PMO focus areas. So, in this article I want to focus on one of those elements, the one that seems to cause the most problems: tools.
For most organizations, there are two categories of tools that need to be considered here: the project management and administration tools that are used by teams, and the portfolio management tools that support organizational planning, consolidated reporting, etc. In most cases, both sets of functionality are available in the same software platform, but in my experience there are often different solutions used within organizations depending on specific needs.
There is also the potential for greater diversity at the project tool level with different projects using different tools (or the same tools in different ways) depending on size, complexity and approach. There are also different families of tools available for
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Published at Mon, 23 Apr 2018 04:00:00 +0000
