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SECTION 10

PROJECT MANAGEMENT,
ENTERPRISE PROJECT
MANAGEMENT,
AND ENTERPRISE
RESOURCE PLANNING

For the first eight sections of this book, we focused on project management. We
treated this topic as if project management were the center of the universe. In
fact, we treated project management as if it were alone in the universe. Well, it
shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s not.

True, during the first eight sections, we acknowledged that we had to expand
our range of vision beyond that of the individual project. And we went so far as to
talk about Enterprise Project Management.

In Section 9, we began to expand our horizons further. We recognized that
projects often are a means to an end, rather than the end itself. We looked at the
projects function as a partner with the operations function in achieving the overall
goals and success of the firm.

In Section 10, we continue to look outward to the larger system of which proj-
ect management is a part. We start off with a review of the concepts of Enterprise
Project Management (Chapter 10.1). But this is only to set up our discussion of a
much larger universe—one that includes enterprise resource management solu-
tions and integrates them with project management.

Whether a firm is involved in projects or not, it will surely require the manage-
ment of its assets, especially its financial and human resource assets. Thus, while
we have been looking at the tools and systems that are available to support the
projects function, we also have to consider the tools and systems that may be in

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