Project Management Information Systems

    Employees of organizations in which project activities are conducted need to manage this activity. As long as individual projects require the participation of individuals and material resources, it is possible to manage these activities in a fragmented and chaotic manner, but this, as a rule, turns out to be a very inefficient occupation. In real life, the company simultaneously runs several projects in which the same employees (shared resources) participate and a unified system of planning and control of project activities is needed.


    A very important idea that needs to be remembered before we proceed to consider the features of the PMIS: any system is just a tool that will work when the general project management processes are documented and work in the company.

    Consider the components of EMIS (hereinafter citedbook “Management of high-tech programs and projects” by R. Archibald ):

    * Subsystem of organizational procedures support
    * Subsystem of project control
    * Information subsystem of project management
    * Subsystem of technologies and methodologies
    * Subsystem of cultural environment
    * Planning
    subsystem * Subsystem of human resources

    ISMS - a single space for storage and information processing, and within the main groups of project management processes, information can be grouped into the following documents:

    Typical documents in the PMIS

    All of these documents can be created, stored and processed without using computers at all. Remember, “PMIS” is not equal to “computer project management system”. However, computer systems can be of great help in the construction of the ISMS, therefore, today, there are a huge number of them.

    Software products can be described in terms of categories that we can relate to the project management areas described in PMBOK. The following map describes the features inherent in each software category: As a rule, all existing systems fall into several categories. There are other ways to group such software products. For example, in a wikipedia article with a list of existing project management software, the following categories are highlighted:

    EMIS Categories





    * project management (planning, control, project reporting)
    * distributed project management (software for joint activities, cooperation)
    * incident management (service desk)
    * project portfolio
    management * resource management

    Well, for now, that's enough for now. Next time we’ll talk about the most prominent project management products and how the implementation of the PMIS can go.

    Links:

    * Map of standard documents in the project management information system (mmap)
    * Category map of software for project management (mmap)

    The original of this entry is available at http://andrewkulikov.com/archives/55

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