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GCN Home > 05/26/08 issue

Double vision

Project management tools can combine the long view with fine-grained details

By David Essex, Special to GCN

Sometimes it’s hard to see the forest for the trees. And sometimes it’s just as hard to see the trees for the forest. A good project management program should help you do both.

Faced with perennial budget pressures and accountability mandates, agencies continue to look to project and portfolio management software to gain control over their operations. With project tools handling basic details such as task lists and work schedules — and portfolio management filling in financial plans, analysis and benchmarks — it is possible to get a handle not only on how you execute projects but also why you do them in the first place. Better still, you can get the two working in tandem.

At the federal level, capital planning and investment control (CPIC) mandates this kind of alignment through a three-stage process that mirrors the functions of project and portfolio tools.

For several years, major software vendors have offered CPIC features or specialized bundles, including reporting of capital requests to the Office of Management and Budget in exhibits 53 and 300.

More recently, they have begun to support another mandate, an early warning system called earned value management, a subdiscipline of project management used for measuring completed work against a baseline plan.

However, earned value management has gained limited acceptance so far. “It’s something that takes time,” said Keith Lee, product manager and vice president of project management tools at Day and Zimmermann Dassian. “In the past two years, they’ve started getting more serious about it.”

“It’s a big training issue, having more people versed in the worth of earned value management” said Mike Isman, a principal at Booz Allen Hamilton. “In some agencies, it’s become [a question of] ‘Is this just a check-the-box thing I’m doing, or is this valuable?’ ” The solution might be sharing success stories and hiring more people with EVM experience, he said.

“The quality of the tools to support the process surrounding it is evolving,” said Jon Hughes, vice president of the technology solutions group at Robbins-Gioia. “Some do it better than others.”

More news on related topics: IT Management, Software Applications, Workflow / Collaboration



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