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Confessions of a Recovering Projectholic

Confessions of a Recovering Projectholic – There’s more to life than MS Project and Project Server


Hello, my name is Mack and I’m an IT professional and a projectholic. I’ve spent most of my consulting career believing MS Project and Project Server were the best and only ways to manage projects.

Over the next few weeks my goal is to describe my journey from being a projectholic who spent all his time managing the tool rather than managing the project. Hopefully through this journey we will see better options for project management and reporting.

In my experience, most people do not use MS Project the way it was intended to be used. People generally create a task list and then assign those tasks. This can be easily accomplished using other tools, such as SharePoint, Teams , or even Excel. Excel is probably the worst way to try project management, but, unfortunately, it is probably the most common.

Project Server, when the staff is fully trained and understands how to use the tool, can be a very powerful component of project management. But in my experience, most organizations are unwilling to invest the time and cost it requires to train the staff. Because of this, you encounter the usual response: “This tool stinks.” But it really doesn’t. The tool is fine and is only as good as the people who use it.

Most of the problems I see can be broken into four distinct areas:

  • Enterprise resource leveling
  • Reporting
  • Changes to the plan and tracking change requests
  • Portfolios.

We’ll address each of these in upcoming blogs, and while we may not solve all the problems, we hope to show there is a better way that is easier, faster, and cheaper. So stay tuned. Same bat channel, same bat time.

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