Believe it or not, lots of people go through what I call the project management tools lifecycle. Someone somewhere in your organization puts together some ROI model that figures if the company can prevent overruns on projects and keep everyone on the same page, they can save millions. If that person begins getting momentum and support within the organization, a committee generally gets formulated to assess tools that allow for realization of the aforementioned savings.
So someone in your company then gets tasked with finding a portfolio and project management solution. Most times companies have a copy of MS Project Desktop lying around so that becomes the obvious target. Sometimes consultants are brought in to interview different members of the organization and find tools that meet each group’s requirements. A short list of vendors gets selected and the crazy demo and selection process begins.
Key executives and committees get formed and usually a fairly complicated solution gets selected because it’s the only one that has all of the things that all of the parties involved put on their requirements list.
Whispers of a major shift in how the organization is going to begin doing projects post selection cause excitement and optimism within various members of the IT staff and before we know it, implementation is upon us.
A year goes by, exuberant and cheery trainers are brought in for classes that are mandatory, but we still are not seeing the big savings that started us down this road to begin with. What happened?
This is what I like to refer to as the “O shit” moment. Companies often ask me to help them understand where they went off strategy or why this is not working. I always chuckle when I hear about a company that failed at a project to make projects better.
Most of these projects fail for one reason; the product they choose does not meet the lowest common denominator. So you might be asking, what does that mean? Well, the majority of the people using these types of products are not managers or individuals that likely talk about earned value on their lunch breaks; they’re software engineers, help desk support technicians, financial analysts, and network administrators. The executives bought something that checked off every box, but it was so difficult to use that true adoption never happened. Trust me, the world’s best project and portfolio management product does not check off every box, but it is the easiest thing to use for the majority of the people within the organization. If it does check every box you can almost guarantee adoption will be brutal and garbage in equals garbage out. Remember, adoption rules, and it should not require force or an army of change management consultants to make it happen.
So how should you select a project and portfolio tool? You should still form a committee, build process, and come up with a list of requirements. After you have done this though, put different products down in front of several line level people(without training) and ask them how simple it is to find out what they are supposed to do and how easy it is to report progress on what they have done. The tool that accomplishes that best should be at the top your list even if it does not do X Y or Z.
It’s not a myth that you can save millions by implementing the right portfolio and project management software, but just remember that ease of use is the biggest key to realizing the savings.
