PM Tool

One of my friends wants to do an Application development project for his masters degree. So I asked him why not develop a proper Project Management tool for the industry with some fancy Project Dashboards etc while maintaining the proper flow of information capturing. So he agreed. This is the first part of the requirement definition which I prepared for him. I will keep on publishing the other parts as soon as I prepare them.

In today’s projectized organizations, managing projects successfully is the key of its financial Success. Middle management and the senior Management of such organizations face major challenges of managing such diversified multiple projects. To address this issue, there are many concepts introduced to the industry such as Project Management Office ( PMO) and Project Governance. The main objective of these concepts are to have proper control on all aspects of Project Management by a central place in order to make proper decisions abut projects on time before it becomes a failure.

Most Industries require Project Management tools, Process and skills. In a country Like Sri Lanka, Software industry finds the requirement very critical as software outsourcing is a key export market which generates significant amount of foreign income to the county.

Software industry has been matured over years and it has identified its own differences in nature of its projects. Mainly there are 2 types of software projects in the current context. Some projects are well defined and well planed from the beginning of the project while others evolved rapidly with major scope changes. Industry has introduced different methods for such Plan driven and agile type of projects over years.

Industry is rich with its Project Management tools such as well known MS Project tools. However most of the tools available cater only to planning and progress monitoring process and those tools does not cover the whole scope of Project Management process in terms of Project Office Perspective.

Industry has requirement for a efficient tool which can support PMO Process to control multiple projects while providing accurate information to all project stakeholders including Project Managers, Customers, Change control Panels, PMO staff , Project Sponsors and all the senior managers.

The Proposed tool should address the project from the time its initiated till the project is closed The Project Management process will flow through 5 main phases such as

Initiation

Planning

Execution
Controlling and Closing. ( Comply with PMI standards)

Each area has set of functionalities to cater to the process and will be interlinked with other phases.