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THE CHANGING ENVIRONMENT 131

The Changing Environment

The world of project management has been changing. While this should come as
no surprise, what is startling is the rate of change and the dramatic effect that it is
having on all aspects of this special discipline. It is affecting how we organize for
projects, and how we communicate project information. It is especially affecting
the roles that people play in projects. Because of these changes and equally be-
cause of the latest developments in computer technology, it is also affecting the
design and use of the tools that support project and workforce management.

If we follow the stream of names that have been given to these project man-
agement tools, we can get an idea of the ever-changing model of the project man-
agement world. For the longest time we just called all the tools project
management software. Whether designed to run on mainframes, mini’s, or per-
sonal computers, they focused on the project as the center of the universe, and
addressed each project individually. Resources were either dedicated to the proj-
ect or on loan to the project.

During the past decade, we moved through several changes in this model, as
the relative importance of projects to the typical firm’s bottom line and future was
realized. The first sign of growth was the ability to address multiple projects (al-
though one of the most popular PM tools remained notably weak in this area).
Next, we started to reach out beyond the project-centric view and latched on to
Enterprise Project Management. A few years ago, the reach was extended to in-
clude accounting and human resources elements, as we integrated project man-
agement capabilities with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). We address this
area in Section 10.

With the realization that projects were becoming an essential element of the
firm’s success, we acknowledged a need to bridge the traditional gap that existed
between the projects side and the operations side of the enterprise. Soon, Project
Portfolio Management became the fashion of the year.

In the past few years, yet another model was born: Professional Services Au-
tomation (PSA). The significance of this latest craze is its concentration on human
resources. In each of the earlier modes of project management, there was a
growth in attention to the resource side of projects. However, with PSA, and its
companion title, Workforce Management, we see an increased focus on what is
being called Human Capital. In many ways, the PM/PSA solution addresses the
needs of service-oriented industries as the PM/ERP solutions did for the product-
oriented sector. We take a look at PSA in Section 11.

While all of this was happening, the environment of the workforce, itself, was
changing. One very significant element of change was the growing scarcity of
workers. Another was the greater specialization of workers. Both of these often