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THE ENTERPRISE PM ENVIRONMENT 285

user or end user (people working on projects). Notice that this extends well be-
yond the traditional PM community, bringing in operations people, finance peo-
ple, and senior management.

How could we expect a single, desktop solution to respond to the needs of
such a diverse community? Without a doubt, the planners and project man-
agers still need a robust scheduling tool. But this serves only part of the user
community (and could be expected to be used effectively by only a small part
of that community).

Needs: Traditional Project Management

For starters, here’s where we need a robust time and resource planning tool. It
must support critical path scheduling, resource planning, and cost management.
We expect such tools to include support for:

• WBS type structures, both for tasks and for resources.
• Critical path computation algorithms.
• Definition of available resources.
• Allocation of resources to tasks.
• Automatic leveling of resource demands.
• Alternate Critical Path and Resource Scheduling Modes (such as Critical

Chain and Spreadsheet Resource Assignment).
• Budgeting.
• Progressing of schedule, resources, and costs.
• Earned value measurements and analysis.
• Flexible reporting and communication.

Needs: Enterprise Project Management

Early project management tools were designed for individual projects. Today, we
rarely find projects that stand or get managed alone. Multiple projects are the
norm in today’s firms and the sharing of resources across multiple projects adds
new requirements to our project management tool set. Furthermore, the vast
amount of project information that is developed in the course of planning and ex-
ecuting the work need not be isolated from the other vital data of the enterprise.
So for support of EPM, we should look for

• Electronic time sheets, supporting the collection of actual time spent on
project tasks and auxiliary work. These must allow the posting of time to
all projects in the system, and should support various means of remote