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Some really good things about Microsoft Project Server
and Enterprise Project Management (EPM)
#3: This may not sound like good news but it is.
There are a lot of Enterprise Project Management
(EPM) users out
there. We have heard that the product line has
been wildly successful. There must be 15 million
Microsoft Project legal users worldwide.
Microsoft pretty much owns the desktop market
and is getting a large share of the enterprise
space. We think all of this is a good thing for
the user.
Why? Because deploying Microsoft Project Server is going
to be costly as it is with any enterprise system
and if you are going spend a lot of time and
money then you should consider the risks. We
don't think it is smart business to purchase a
product you are going base
your business on, when you aren't 100% sure what will
happen to the product a few months down the
road. You
don't want to wake up one morning and read that
it has sold to a
firm overseas. Then, when you have adjusted to
all of the new rules and procedures, you find
that it has been sold again to a US firm that has a history
of squeezing their customers. With any
enterprise system you are going to make a
considerable investment, do you want that kind
of risk? Do you want to base your career on
the uncertainty of product life-cycle and
ownership?
These things we
think are true, and it is why we think
Microsoft's Enterprise Project Management (EPM) is a
good investment:
Microsoft is a huge pubic company and they
are not going anywhere in the near future
even with Gates moving into retirement.
They are not going to sell off this product
line.
Microsoft has a history of treating their
customers pretty well. We know there is a
lot of people that have issues with Microsoft. But
given their sphere of desktop control, they
treat us pretty well. No company is perfect,
look at some of the
things Google is trying to pull now that
they
have our attention and devotion.
In general, Microsoft's products tend to improve
over time. EPM is still pretty rough in some areas
but we think it will get better. 2003 was
better than 2002, 2007 is better still in
some critical area like the new Queuing
System. That is
what we have learned to expect from
Microsoft.
And last, if you are managing a deployment
you will deal with attrition. You will get
new people.
When you do, what are they going to know?
Microsoft Project, Project Server, and Windows
SharePoint services. Not
likely some other system.
 Experience:
Our estimate is that it takes 6 months for a
person to develop the required skills to be
a Project Server administrator. If you are
doing capacity resource management project
managers need about 250 hours under their
belt working in all of the eight conceptual
areas of Microsoft Project. They are not
going to get the right experience by taking
a class and receiving one of those Pink
Belts in Microsoft Project.
No one wants to be told this, but it is
true.
The point is, you can't just keep investing
in people's knowledge, skills, and
experience. There are a whole lot more
people out there that know Microsoft Project
than all of the experts combined that work
with other competitive products.
This is the bet we are all making and we
think it is a reasonably sound one: This is
going to be the project management system that
most everyone in the world will be using in the
next decade, so we might as well buckle up and
figure out how to make it fly. Think about
us, we are basing an entire business on
Microsoft's EPM system. We certainly are not
going to base a business on some small privately
owned firm, in say a small eastern town that is going
to tell us what we can and can't do. It is far too risky.
We get no direct business from Microsoft and
it works best that way for our customers. It is
helps to keep our priorities straight and we can feel free to
give our customers straight information because
we not indebted to anyone. The
market is so huge we can run a business without
Microsoft's involvement. That is good news for
us, and it is good news for you.
Experience:
Suppose you were dependent on Microsoft
Consulting Services? How bad would that be?
Sorry, that is a bit of a dig because we know
some of you may have purchased consulting hours along with your enterprise
agreements. Maybe it has worked out for you
pretty well, and we hope so. We have never met
an incompetent Microsoft technical resource and
we have worked side-by-side with a few. But we
have also noticed they are not inclined to
provide a customer the same perspective on
things that we might. Once we remember, at a
partner technical briefing, the speaker chided
the audience for telling customers that certain
EPM features didn't work. His perspective was
that a workaround could always be found by
technically competence and that some people are
too quick to dismiss a feature as broken. I
think you get our point, "workaround at what
cost?"
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