Before Choosing a PM Tool, Answer These 7 Questions
Your business is growing, and it’s time to invest in an enterprise project and portfolio management tool. You know it will give you a single version of the truth, provide clear reporting and enable executives to make better decisions about what projects to continue and which to put on hold.
But where do you start? There are so many options available to you and the choice of different modules and features can be overwhelming. Here are the 7 questions you must ask before choosing a PM tool that’s right for you.
1. How easy is it to use?
The number one thing that makes people reluctant to shift to a new software tool is ease of use. If it’s too difficult – or even perceived to be too difficult – then your team will be reluctant to use it.
Enterprise-grade portfolio management software does have a learning curve, especially if your business hasn’t used that kind of tool before. It’s unrealistic to expect there will be no training overhead required, but think about what happens when the trainers leave. Is the tool intuitive? Does it have built in help or can you get access to training resources to support individuals who need to refer back to the materials?
Check out the software demo, screenshots and take advantage of any available free trial to see how user friendly the product is. Ask about PMO tool training and see how the organization approaches supporting users to get started.
2. Can we share plans with people outside the organization?
Review what user permissions are available in the tool. You should be able to set different levels of access for different user groups. People outside your organization will normally have lower levels of access permission than your own employees, but they can still see project dashboards or reports that are relevant to them.
Even if you don’t need this feature now, consider if you will need it in the future. As your business scales and you want clients and suppliers to be able to monitor the project’s progress, do you really want to switch to another tool?
3. Does it do real-time reporting?
Your PMO has enough to do without constantly updating manual reports for stakeholders who want to see the latest figures. Make sure any tool you invest in has the capacity to process data in real time.
Even if the tool can cope with real-time reporting, it can only show you the data that has been entered. If the project management team doesn’t currently have a culture of entering data in real time, you’ll want to pair your tool selection with PMO organizational change management to help embed the practices that will make the software a success.
4. How secure is it?
If your business works on government contracts, you’ll be familiar with the requirements for software security. Your data needs to be safe in order to meet contractual requirements, but also because it’s good business practice to secure your assets.
Look for encryption and other security features that protect your data and your reputation.
5. What does it integrate with?
Enterprise project management tools do a lot of things, but you will still probably want to integrate them with the rest of your IT estate. For example, you could pull a list of staff members from your HR system into Primavera to save creating each resource individually.
Look at what you currently have in the organization and where data from the project management tool needs to go. You may have to send timesheet data in or out of the system, and integrate with finance apps for client billing or earned value management tracking.
These days, interfaces are much simpler to set up. Budget some time and resource to get the tech working as you need it to. These integrations should be specifically called out in the business case before choosing a PM tool.
7. Does it do what we need?
Finally – although these are in no way priority order – does the tool offer the features that you need? If you are looking for something to do simple task management, an enterprise grade tool with EVM is probably going to feel unwieldly. If you need to do risk modelling, you’ll want something more substantive than a lightweight Gantt chart tool.
Make a list of features you absolutely must have. Then use MoSCoW analysis to build out other requirements by order of priority. There will probably be some internal discussions within the team as you work through who needs what and how important it is to be present in the tool you buy.
Your software choice will become an integral part of the PMO. There are a number of tools to evaluate, and many firms decide on the robust, enterprise tool suites from Oracle Primavera, Deltek and Microsoft. These products have features that let you create a central repository of all projects within an organization, which is essential for building out your PMO on strong foundations. They also have solid reporting and portfolio management capabilities. Whatever product you settle on, consider bringing in an expert implementation partner to help you get it set up and supporting your processes as quickly as possible.