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EFFECT ON TOOL SELECTION 265

Effect on Tool Selection

We can trace the shifting project management emphasis on the patterns of
project management tools. First, there were the project-oriented tools. These
provided support for detailed planning and control of individual projects. With
the shift to enterprise project management, we saw a change in the project
management tools to support multiple projects and multiple users. In some
cases, these tools were designed to allow use of the traditional desktop, single
project products, by providing a repository-based, client/server environment
that consolidated individual projects and added multiproject, multiuser time
entry, cross-project resource loading and analysis, and cross-project rollup and
reporting. In parallel with that trend, we saw the development of full-featured
enterprise project management tools, using built-in multiproject scheduling
engines and time entry capabilities.

For Project Portfolio Management, additional attributes are required. The
ability to add or extract projects for what-if analyses is important. Executives also
want to place some value criteria on the projects, so that they can evaluate the
relative benefits of adding a project to the mix. Resource and cost impacts of
projects will have to be defined at higher than normal levels (because the details
might not yet be available or practical to define). Somehow, these executives will
expect that the new Project Portfolio Management systems will be able to sup-
port ROI calculations (but I don’t think that they have yet defined how this
would be done).

Tool Tip Software support for Project Portfolio Management
requires capabilities and features that extend beyond those in
traditional PM systems. Key extensions include: improved mul-
tiproject capabilities, adding and removal of projects from
portfolios, association with strategic plans, workforce impact
analysis, and integration with some of the Operations tools.

The ability to slice and dice large repositories of project information becomes
paramount in these systems. The data must be able to be rolled up and expanded,
and must be able to be viewed from several perspectives. As the volume of data
increases, we will need more sophisticated ways of manipulating the data, so that
we don’t have to wait for the analyses. Expanded coding capabilities are essential
to enabling effective summarization and data extraction.