Portfolio Project Management (PPM) is an enterprise solution class for governing the full project lifecycle. One solution tried was Changepoint from Compuware. The following summarizes the issues in the core software that lead to project failure and replacement. I share this so others can consider these factors in evaluating any PPM solution:
• Performance
Reports take an inordinate amount of time to run. Reports that span months and projects time-out. Export of reports takes a long time or fails for larger reports. Sorting of report data within a report takes an extraordinarily long time. Large reports produce out of memory errors and lock up user PC.
• Baselines not supported
Changepoint only supports one baseline, and has very limited support for baseline of budget/schedule at project and task level.
• Reliability
Users encounter random errors, lost data, and cryptic warnings. The MS-Project plug in self-corrupts. Reports self-corrupt. Custom SQL in reports gets spontaneously dropped. PMs are forced to repeat changes to plans after the MS-Project plug-in crashes with obscure errors.
• Administrative overhead
Maintaining plans, users and reports requires an excessive level of support. The effort to add users, and manage the system is far greater than under the previous tool (MS-Project Server). Each plan created needs to manually be opened one at a time to each user in the company. Attributes such as Application can only be assigned to tasks one at a time.
• Inflexibility
Once a project is allocated to client or an initiative, it can never be changed. Once a budget is frozen, it can never be changed. MSP component is backward and forward incompatible between releases and even service packs.
• Usability
The user interface is outdated, and difficult to use. Most drop-down menus require several clicks to populate the menu before it can be used. The user interface confounds users and flies in the face of industry standards. Scheduling resource terminations or effective dates triggers a cascade of problems rendering these features unusable. Project Managers have been unable to effectively plan for effort and cost within plans, as small changes to plans result is huge unexpected changes in schedule and cost.
• Real-time
The system requires SQL batch jobs to both bring data up to date, and correct data problems. Core financial data is often out of date, requiring administrative staff to run batch jobs on request.
• Licensing
When there are insufficient licenses, additional users cannot be added even if only briefly, which interferes with resource setup, such as when resources need to be activated to run a report on their time. Even if just one out of 310 features have no available licenses, Changepoint prevents the user from being added, during which time some feature licenses remain allocated. We believe the license tracking system sub-optimizes license allocation and unnecessarily allocates multiple licenses to users. The internal admin account consumes a power user license which cannot be given to users, yet is the most expensive license available. The licensing scheme is needlessly complex to the point of being unmanageable, with 310 different license-tracked features. Despite careful attempts to calculate and track licenses, we have been surprised repeatedly by the need to purchase more licenses.
• Architecture
The Changepoint architecture is outdated and monolithic , combining all client data into one database with the core product. This increases maintenance, complexity and impacts reliability. The reliance on batch files is problematic, as the data is at risk of being out of date, pending a batch job run. Vendor provided reports are hard-coded and not user editable.
• Budgeting
Budgets cannot be adjusted historically. The tool cannot accommodate the company budget process without inordinate effort, along with difficult and obscure adaptation of tool features.
• Integration
The reports are not easily integrated into the presentation layer of other tools for summary and dashboard reporting. The ability of Changepoint to work with MS-Project, which is our standard project management tool, is severely limited. Many fields do not get supported within MS-Project. Single-Sign on fails when a user changes their password. LDAP integration is weak.
• Tracking of converted resources
Changepoint by design cannot accommodate and report correctly on resource conversions from consultant to employee.
• Timesheet summary tasks
Users cannot see the summary task for their timesheet tasks. The causes user confusion, and Project Manager headache to make every task readable as the summary tasks are not visible.
In summary, proper evaluation is absolutely critical to PPM project success. Forewarned is forearmed. I won’t make the same mistake twice. Heck, I wish I didn’t make the same mistake once!
