A Framework for Better System

Now a recognized profession, project management is responsible for some of the largest and most complex projects the world has seen. As a result, the executive level watches those projects more closely, in turn exposing one of the challenges project managers face.

While many of the technologies in use have advanced, legacy project control applications developed twenty years ago are still the norm. These entrenched programs and the practices they entail actually undermine time to value through the bottlenecks they impose. Legacy software is increasingly the problem; it no longer provides the solution.

This discussion paper looks at the issues surrounding software used for project control systems and the penalties imposed by incumbent legacy architecture. These penalties include:

• time essentially lost while developing workarounds so that the old software will do what we want,
• data that is saved to a local drive to accommodate the desktop application and thus not shared with the team,
• data that is potentially overlooked or lost when porting it to another application for further evaluation.

We will then look at the advantages the newest technologies offer to project management, and how they eliminate those inherited inefficiencies.