Like any great project manager, you are in charge of a number of resources (staff, project assistants, and team members). It could be two people. Or a large team of 20. Or if it’s a huge project, or even a program, you may have a hundred or more resources assigned to help you.
And your boss thinks all you need is Microsoft Project.
Do Enterprise Tools Make You an Effective Project Manager?
No dig against MS Project – I use it almost every day to manage my large, complex, enterprise-wide projects. It lets me manage the dependencies on tasks, and get into the nitty gritty details of how much each resource is assigned to a task, and what those resources cost the project, and how much “work” those resources can do, and how much value they add to the project in terms of billable hours. I can develop a highly complex plan that shows how 10 tasks are dependent on 20 other tasks, and weave a giant web of inter-dependencies.
So, what usually happens is that after a few weeks, you end up spending more most of your time trying to make your project schedule work every time you make a change that impacts a dependency. Been there? Groan..
In summary, your project management tools have taken over your life. And chances are, you just want to get organized, be able to assign tasks, and stay on top of what they are doing.
You have to really credit the companies who develop robust, highly complex project management tools. Something big like Teamcenter or MS Office Project Server has everything, does everything, and reports everything. If you have time to figure out how to make it work so that you can actually become productive on your project.
Great – you can now produce very detailed earned value management reports detailing just how well your project is tracking against the planned schedule and the planned cost.
But what if your project management tools put your project at risk because you have to spend all your time inputting all the data that necessary? What if you just want to get organized? What if you are doing a simpler project that is on the fly and requires a lot of flexibility to remain competitive? What if you want to have a real life, in addition to being a project manager?
Take Back Control of Your Project
What you’d like to be able to do is start over with something small and simple, that gets the job done. You’d like to start over, defining small tasks and handing them off to people who can get them done, getting status reports when you can use them instead of when your software thinks you need them — of feeling a sense of accomplishment when you get something done, not when your project management tools leave you alone.
Choose the Right Project Management Tool for the Job
It’s time to take a step back from your project and look at it from a new perspective. Or perhaps you want to start a new, smaller project, or a fairly simple and flexible sub-project. With the right tools, you can start small, and grow from there.
Pick the project management tools that treat you like an adult. For a highly flexible, dynamic solution to managing competitive project, check out Basecamp.
