THE SEARCH FOR AN enterprise project management system is starting to seem like the 300-year Crusades. You remember them: The Christian nobility of Europe were intent on wresting control of the Holy Land from the Muslims. The project lasted for ages, consumed huge levels of resources (on both sides), always seemed to be just about finished, and ultimately didn't deliver much on the intended results.
It sounds a lot like the hunt for enterprise project management systems. Since the desire has been around for so long with no clear leading solution, you have to wonder about the mandate. Some evidence suggests there's no real interest in an enterprise project management solution. After all, it is a truism that individuals will be reluctant to document their failure to meet commitments. Project management systems are often perceived as just such a system.
What Drives Us Toward Enterprise Project Management? What drives this mania toward an enterprise project management system? It's a desire to affect the organization. Projects produce deliverables. Those deliverables are either sold to clients or used to enhance the delivery of other deliverables to clients. Projects use the organization's available resources, and control of both sides of that equation is control of the enterprise—pure and simple.
The Y2K phenomenon of the late ’90s moved more and more organizations toward the EPM goal. After all, the whole ERP movement stands for enterprise resource planning (sounds a lot like project management, doesn't it?) Many of the ERP systems started from manufacturing management then extended into core accounting. Project management in these systems was originally quite weak, but that is improving. SAP now offers a new slant on their project scheduling module, which I hear is worth looking at, and PeopleSoft has taken a serious interest in offering activity-based-costing functionality down to the task level. Yet, thus far, these tools have been targeted much too high in the organization to affect the day-to-day project planning and control that is the purview of the more traditional project management software vendors.
As ERP gives way to customer relationship planning, we'll probably see even more interest in project management. After all, what's more important to a client than ensuring deliverables are actually delivered?
We are striving to bring more and more of the organization closer together. All of these movements push in that direction.
The desire for such a system won't go away. PMI's Seminars & Symposium Proceedings is filled each year with papers from some of the world's largest organizations, pledging their commitment to implementing such a system. I've been seeing solutions offered for enterprise project management for years. Some with more and some with less success.
High-End Tools Alone Are Too Restrictive. In the mid-’80s, enterprise project management was mostly offered to large centralized project office structures. Defense and Aerospace were notable targets. High-end systems were the first offerings. They were complex to operate and, as a result, were almost always used only by established project management offices, where skill and ongoing training could be centralized in a few individuals. Access to such systems was like a black box— information was trundled in, some magic was done by the wizards who could make such systems work, and a report was synthesized out and distributed to management. These reports often carried information about the entire enterprise, but the report would be limited by the organization's ability to supply raw data from the field— no small challenge. As a consequence, these high-end systems never reached beyond the highly skilled hands of the professional project manager.
Low-End Tools Aren't Enough. The advent of Windows in the early ’90s saw a new movement of software entering the fray. Low-end tools attempted to take over the enterprise market by sheer numbers. Compliancy equaled integration was the concept. There have been numerous vendors of easy-to-use desktop tools; the most notable is, of course, Microsoft Project. The number of licenses of project management software sold by Microsoft is staggering. Microsoft says it has sold over 3 million MS Project licenses. It's a stunningly impressive number but despite virtual compliancy (I think every major company in the world has at least one copy of MS Project), enterprise project management integration still eludes this product. The problem isn't MS Project. It's the conflicting mix of high-end standards, analysis, and reporting combined with the ease-of-use that makes such systems fully deployable that is required. Without the first, you've only got a lot of stand-alone users. Without the second, you've got the power you need but not the distribution across the enterprise to feed it.
A Mixture Was a Good Idea, But Came Up Short. The mid-’90s saw a new take on the market. For the first time high-end/low-end solutions were presented. There were several of these, but notable mention would have to go to Primavera with its P3/Suretrack combination and to Welcom with Open Plan Professional/Open Plan Desktop. The concept behind such offerings is fascinating. The high-end tool is pictured as a centralized analysis engine. The low-end, less expensive tool is seen as an easy-to-use, easy-to-distribute application. I think it's fair to say that both vendors would say today that while a number of sales have been made of these combinations, the hoped for growth to take over the enterprise market never materialized for either.
Around the same time, Artemis and a number of other firms, such as Microframe, took a different tack. Instead of creating a low-end product to partner with their higher-end systems, these vendors decided to partner with Microsoft. Microsoft Project would become the easy-to-use deployable application and they would supply the centralized analysis and reporting engine. The notion was to ride on Microsoft's coattails and realize tremendous growth by being attached to the growth of MS Project. Unfortunately for these high-end vendors, the results of this were not much different from the vendors who decided to create their own. Some sales materialized, but the hoped for boom never came.
The problem with both of these approaches is pretty simple. No matter how much the high-end tools tried to integrate MS Project (and some of them did it very well) the products were never designed to work together.
The Popularity of MS Project Carries Hundreds of Vendors With It. What these vendors did do was lead a virtual tidal wave of third-party vendors that have created products that link to MS Project. Over 300 vendors have jumped onto Microsoft's train by creating products that somehow add value to MS Project. It's fair to say that virtually every major request for proposal today includes some requirement for MS Project integration.
The MS Project “add-on” market comes in a number of categories. The simple ones add functions like extra reporting, extra analysis such as risk analysis, or additional data tracking such as issue management. There are also products that extend the functionality of MS Project into different directions. An enterprise-timesheet, for example, allows MS Project to be used for planning at a central location and then use the timesheet for project progress data collection across the enterprise. This avoids some of MSP's shortcomings when distributed as a multi-user project management system as opposed to a desktop project scheduling system. Of course, MS Project 2000 has come a long way in trying to mitigate this scenario through the use of Project Central, but there are still plenty of vendors who can add value to the basic system.
The remarkable growth of the Microsoft Project market is simply unprecedented in this industry. Some reports put Microsoft Project sales at over $450 million last year and unconfirmed targets of almost $900 million this year and $1.4 billion (yes, that's billion with a B!) in 2001. Despite this staggering volume of MS Project sales, many of us in the high-end project management software market believed that Microsoft would never enter the high-end area. It's not that anyone thought Microsoft couldn't. It's clear that they have the resources to enter any software market that interests them. The problem with the high-end enterprise market is that it's a complex sell. Deploying a working enterprisewide project management environment is not for the faint of heart. It requires ongoing intense work covering a long period of time. It's not something we can box in some manner and sell at your local software retailer.
Has Microsoft Entered the High-End Market? Now, however, we may be seeing the beginnings of the most significant application move Microsoft has ever made and it's happening right here in the project management arena. By the time you read this, some of the details of this move will no doubt be clearer, but recent announcements by Microsoft have announced their intent in combining the functionality of the higher-end eLabor product line with MS Project 2000 and Project Central. The announcement comes with news of an investment by Microsoft into eLabor.
It's impossible to know, of course, exactly what Microsoft's intentions are, but a possibility is that if Microsoft has determined that making over a billion dollars requires going after the enterprise market and that a combination of high-end functionality with desktop ease-of-use could deliver it, then we may see a new product line combination that will make major waves. The jury's out, of course, until we see what Microsoft's intentions are. Perhaps there will be more consolidation in the market, either by Microsoft or in reaction to this move.
ONE THING FOR SURE: This kind of move with the growth Microsoft is hoping for will expand the entire category. With that much money being spent on project management, there's room for all manners of add-ons and after-market suppliers regardless of what category you're in. Even products that would appear to be in direct competition will enjoy newfound attention as more and more focus is placed on enterprise project management. ■