Preface from Chris Capossela, General Manager, Microsoft Project
Seventy-four percent of all IT projects fail, come in over budget, or run past their original deadlines. And every year in the United States alone, $75 billion is spent on failed IT projects. Worse yet, the people working on these projects frequently know that the projects are going to fail well before their executive management teams hear about it and have the opportunity to cancel those projects.
Ask executives how they prioritize initiatives across their organizations. Or ask for the status of their top five initiatives, or if they’re confident that they have the right people working on the right projects. We at Microsoft have asked customers these questions and others like them. Too frequently, the answer we get is that customers don’t know. They simply can’t get at this information—because they lack the tools, particularly the enterprise project management tools, to generate those answers.
Two and a half years ago, we set out to address this problem. We had three top-level goals. First, we wanted to make project management easier. We had this goal on the Project team for about 12 years, and I think we’ll have this goal at least 12 years more. It’s so crucial to what we do with Microsoft Project that it’s never going to disappear from our goal sheet.
Our second goal was to enable team members to collaborate on their project work without even needing Project for Windows on their PCs. We wanted them to be able to use just their Web browsers, e-mail, and the Office suite to collaborate on all of their tasks, work on project-related documents, create and assign issues, and report time against their tasks, so they’d always know the status of each task assigned to them and how much time would be required for completion. To expand the audience for, and the value of, Microsoft Project, it was crucial that we enable all of this from inside the Web browser. It’s not about having Microsoft Project for Windows on more desktops; it’s about expanding both the number of people who can collaborate and the amount of data on which they can collaborate.
Our third goal was to deliver a world-class enterprise project management solution, something that we’ve never tried to do in a significant way. We wanted to make it very easy for executives to manage their portfolio of initiatives, to set priorities on those initiatives, and to ensure that others could map their projects to those priorities. We wanted to deliver compelling technology around enterprise resource management—for example, to enable executives, for the first time, to track the skill sets in their organizations so thoroughly that they could project how many Visual Basic developers would be available to begin a major project 3 months away. And we wanted companies to be able to integrate this project management data across their existing systems—for example, to tie project data to SAP R/3, PeopleSoft, their Microsoft Exchange Server address book, their Active Directory service, or Great Plains software.
To meet this rich mix of goals, we created Microsoft Project 2002. We think it’s an offering unlike any other on the market. Microsoft Project 2002 is an excellent planning tool with unparalleled ease of use, integrated collaboration, and high-end enterprise project management functionality. Microsoft Project 2002’s enterprise capabilities, combined with its value-based pricing, will make enterprise project management more affordable and attractive for customers worldwide.
Microsoft Project 2002 is also unlike anything that we’ve offered before. For the first time, Microsoft Project is actually a family of products that work well together and provide customers with the flexibility to pick the right set of functionality for their needs. Because Microsoft Project 2002 is intended as a key part of complex enterprise solutions, we needed to provide more than a one-size-fits-all approach.
Traditional desktop project managers can select Microsoft Project 2002 Standard without having to invest in enterprise functionality. Customers who want true enterprise functionality can move to Microsoft Project 2002 Professional and Microsoft Project Server 2002. Team members who want to report their progress and collaborate on projects need only point their browsers to Microsoft Project Server to use Microsoft Project Web Access. We’ve further enriched Microsoft Project with SharePoint Team Services so everyone can easily collaborate on any document, drawing, or expense report and relate it to projects or tasks from the same site they use to update their progress on those projects.
Because Microsoft Project 2002 is easier than ever before, users will find they can take advantage of it immediately. And because Microsoft Project 2002 is so rich in functionality, users will find more and more ways to take advantage of it over time. But time is one commodity of which most of us have too little, regardless of how well we manage it. That’s why books such as this one, by Gary Chefetz, can be so important. In it, you’ll learn more about enterprise project management and how Microsoft Project 2002 can become central to your enterprise project management solution and to making your enterprise more productive, more agile, more competitive, and more profitable than ever before. Welcome to the world of enterprise project management—and to the world of Microsoft Project 2002.
