Chapter 5: Tools


Overview

A the number of projects managed by an organization grows larger and the projects become more complicated, the existence of an adequate information system to support operations is essential.

Tools for project management have long focused on the scheduling of tasks, but the PO needs more information than that yielded by task scheduling. An adequate information system for a PO must provide, in addition to the traditional scheduling capabilities, explicit functionality to monitor the status of resources across projects, and what-if capabilities to support portfolio analysis.

Although the functionality they offer might seem similar, not all tools are the same, nor can the PO delegate responsibility to the IT department for deciding which ones should be used. Information systems can provide organizations with a competitive edge, not only because they enable them to do things that could not otherwise be done, but because the tools themselves become knowledge containers. Through customization and the encoding of business practices, tools make the experience and insight of your best contributors operational throughout the organization.

This chapter begins with the presentation of an idealized information system for the project-based organization and concludes with a survey, necessarily incomplete, of commercial tools that approximate the functionality described here.




Running the Successful Hi-Tech Project Office
Running the Successful Hi-Tech Project Office (Artech House Technology Management Library)
ISBN: 1580533736
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 81

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