Back up to speed ahead
Project management software's future can be unlocked by examining the trends of the past decade

Well, remarkable as it may seem, this is the 100th column I've submitted for Computing Canada and I thought it might be a good time to take a moment to look back over the last few years and see if the trend of what has gone before can give us some notion of what to expect next.

My very first article for Computing Canada was written in 1993 and published in 1994 so in a way it's also my 10th anniversary of writing for Computing Canada. The subject of my first article was "Choosing PM Software" and made the premise that in an enterprise pm software implementation, the level of product should be appropriate to the type user - Hmmm, seems we haven't come so far in 10 years after all.

If we look back just a little bit farther to the release of the PC and the great change from centralized computing to desktop computing during the 80s we always see project managers at the edge of the wave. PMs have always been early adopters and with that comes some baggage. Project managers naturally look to the future and often have a vision of how things could be better.

Project management back in the 80s though was all about the schedule. Virtually every project management system was schedule-centric, giving rise to the newfound popularity of critical path methodology management. As the economy advanced and management adopted project management techniques we saw the rise and adoption of the matrix environment. One aspect of the company would manage the resources; another would manage the projects' results. Sounds like a good plan. Different flavors of the matrix model are virtually universally accepted now as the way to do business in the white-collar sector.

Well, coming back to pm systems, you'd think that the early 90s would have been all about adjusting to matrix management but in fact; we were too busy with technology. The early pm software houses were now scrambling to re-write their tools for Windows to better capture the desktop market. When the dust settled, Microsoft would have gained a huge sector of the pm software market leaving everyone else fighting for a distant 2nd place.

No sooner had we finished with Windows when we were called upon to rewrite our tools for Client/Server support - apparently while we were busy rewriting our systems, re-centralization of data was underway and now pm products would have to work on MS SQL Server and Oracle. That effort wasn't quite complete before the Web made it's presence known in the late 90s and everyone was scrambling once again to adjust to a new technology foundation with a Web interface.

Most recently we've seen the two software behemoths of the 90s, SAP and Microsoft, targeting the project management marketplace.

What's to come? While we've been busy working on rewriting basic scheduling, the world has moved along. Many organizations are now resource centric - looking from their skill pools to see what they can accomplish before deciding what they will commit to accomplishing. That's a very different paradigm from the kind of project management that got this whole craze going in the 80s. Upcoming versions of a range of tools including MS Project are adjusting to tackle that demand directly. We can expect a range of new resource-oriented features in the coming months. Either way, it's most likely that project managers will stay on the edge of the technology wave.

For more information on this article or any aspect of project management software or systems contact the author, Chris Vandersluis or HMS Software at info@hmssoftware.ca or by phone at 514-695-8122.