Q&A: The evolution of project, portfolio management

Computerworld - SAN DIEGO -- As project management and portfolio management disciplines have matured over the years, vendors that support these functional areas have had to evolve along with them -- or die trying. One vendor that has survived is Bala Cynwyd, Pa.-based Primavera Systems, Inc. With 22 consecutive years of revenue growth and profitability under its belt, the company has adapted well to changing market demands.

Computerworld's Thomas Hoffman caught up with Primavera co-founder and CEO Joel Koppelman at the company's 23rd annual user conference here yesterday. Excerpts from the interview follow:

How's business? Where are you seeing particularly strong growth right now? We're doing well across the board. We're doing particularly well in the public sector and in the technology space. In the public sector, some of this is being driven by government regulations which require federal agencies to report on project management in an accurate and consistent way.

What's new that you're hearing from customers at this year's conference? As I think about the conversations I've had today, people are talking a lot about enterprise-wide project management, not about managing individual projects. And it's across industries. It's this view of "I need to know everything at one time."

Another customer was telling me that it's harder to keep smaller projects in scope if you don't manage them closely. If they get off [target], they go off by a lot.

A few of Primavera's construction and engineering customers told me they're concerned that as the company has expanded its product development into other vertical industries, some of the focus appears to be shifting away from products they use. We've never cut back R&D spending in any of those verticals. But we're really making more noise in other verticals now like public sector and technology.

If you add functionality that helps people to collaborate, it doesn't matter what industry they're in.

What kinds of challenges are IT managers with several years' experience in using portfolio management tools and techniques, facing? It's a topic near and dear to my heart: What kinds of requests are you getting and how are you getting them? By e-mail? Are they justified requests or things that business managers just want to do? That's the first problem.

The second problem is that the people (business managers) who want things done, like an SAP implementation, are making up ROI [return-on-investment] numbers. It's all guesswork. So if people are checking a year later (after the project has been approved and started) and want to know how it's going, there's no accountability. Unless you have good planning tools, you're going to get bad estimates.