While business and economic conditions change all the time, a revolution (or a drastic change in managing projects using advanced technologies and IT software solutions) is a discontinuous and abrupt series of IT innovations that make a foundation for effective project technology management. Due to the acceleration of IT software development and further implementation of project technologies in real project environments, today you can hardly find a project that doesn’t use IT software solutions for driving changes.
In this article, let’s talk briefly about project technology management and how IT software solutions and project technology contribute to better development of project planning and change management.
PM Areas Influenced by IT
Let’s imagine you’re in charge of managing a project. You’re a project manager and need to utilize IT solutions that can facilitate project planning and make a foundation for robust project implementation. Once you’ve implemented a software solution and tried to respond to new changes within project technology management, now you need to find out the following: in what way can project technology change around your project? What areas will be influenced by IT software solutions? Answering these questions will help you establish effective management of project technology and IT software solutions.
Information technology solutions have an ability to drive project changes and are a foundation for efficient project technology management. Below I outline a list of key areas in a typical project that are influenced by the implementation of IT software solutions.
- Online Team Collaboration. Project technology management is based on online collaborative software tools that bring outsourced and virtual teams close together for team-focused activities. Online communication, videoconferencing, teleworking, web-based meetings, webinars are considered a factor that drives project changes and brings teams, executives and stakeholders closer together.
- Project Organizational Structure. Because people involved in your project can efficiently collaborate with each other and instantly exchange information, IT solution software facilitates changes to organizational structure of the project.
The changes will build new reporting relationships, increase extent of project control, establish quicker and simplified decision making, improve supervision and quality management, reduce the number of errors etc. A new organizational structure will be much effective. Project technology management will make a foundation for creating the relationships with customers and suppliers, partnerships, and alliances.
- Resource Management. Through establishing effective communications channels and building team collaboration, executives and planners can better allocate project resources and track resource consumption.
IT solutions makes project IT management be cost effective because senior management is enabled to plan and monitor resources using electronic spreadsheets, cost estimates, schedules, balances, etc.
- Team Training. By enhancing “in place” team training and staff mentoring through videoconferencing, e-mail, webinars, groupware, and training conferences, you can improve the overall project performance as well as increase productivity of a separate teammate.
The implementation of IT software solutions and the foundation of remote PM will facilitate distance learning and provide access to vast amounts of reference material. Project technology management will bring cost-effective solutions by facilitating collaborative training and education regardless of time zones and distance.
Summary
For the last 20 years, project technology management reinforced IT software solutions has significantly changed the way we plan and do our projects. Today we try not only to use IT project solutions to gain a new project management advantage but also to give an advantage to our project customers. Efficient management of project technology and IT solutions allows us to bring our project participants and customers closer together in terms of communication, collaboration and overall project management.