| ©2004, PDF for download, 46pp., Center for Business Practices
Advice to organizations thinking about implementing an Enterprise Project Management System: pay particular attention to cultural change challenges, put a heavy emphasis on gathering requirements up front, and commit to both project management and business process improvement. These lessons learned are among the results of a survey of twenty-two project management practitioners by the Center for Business Practices, the research arm of the consulting and training organization, PM Solutions.
The CBP surveyed a highly select group of senior practitioners who are actively involved in implementing a Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management System in their organizations. The survey, Implementing Enterprise Project Management Systems, was designed to investigate the challenges and lessons learned in the implementation of EPM Systems as well as to benchmark the experiences of organizations that are currently undergoing EPM System implementations.
The survey results revealed that the most important capability of an EPM System is reporting. Portfolio management is very important to some companies, but very unimportant to others. Resource management is fairly important. And workflow and collaboration capabilities are by far the least important. The most cited capabilities that drew respondents to an EPM System solution included time reporting, resource planning, executive dashboards, project-level status reporting, and document management. The research consistently shows the paramount need of organizations to capture and report project metrics to help in management decision-making.
Executive management sponsored a majority of the implementations. Unfortunately, the survey results show that a significant number of sponsors felt like their EPM Systems had not met expectations, and only a few thought they exceeded expectations. The challenge is in demonstrating the benefits of the EPM System and in meeting expectations of benefit attainment in an acceptable timeframe.
Implementing Enterprise Project Management Systems: A Benchmark of Current Business Practicesis the first survey to provide benchmark data on a wide variety of issues surrounding the implementation of EPM Systems in organizations. The findings are helpful in understanding the challenges in implementing EPM Systems, and what, in general, most organizations have experienced. |
