Running the Successful Hi-Tech Project Office (Artech House Technology Management Library)

5.1 Information needs

A PO information system (see Figure 5.1) must satisfy the needs of three groups of users: the PO and senior manager, concerned with projects and competencies, the project managers, who deal with tasks and generic resources, and the line managers, whose concern is with tasks and named resources. But whatever the user group, the same basic questions must be answered [1]:

• What needs to be done?

• How much will it cost?

• When can it be done?

• What resources will be utilized?

• What are the consequences of doing A instead of B?

• Where are we in relation to where we planned to be at this point?

• Is work progressing at an acceptable rate?

• Where are we going to be a month from now?

Figure 5.1: Different stakeholders have different objectives but all can be reduced to four basic information needs: What? When? Who? Where are we?. (After: [2].)

These simple questions define the basic functionality that any PO information system must provide.

By information system we do not imply a single application package provided by a single vendor or a homegrown monolithic application. The PO information system could very well be made up of a mixture of commercial tools and some internal development. What distinguishes a bunch of tools from a system is that in the latter all the tools have the same understanding of what the data represents, they share it, and users are not forced to enter it more than once. If users need to copy and paste between dissimilar applications, or if there exist copies of the same data in slightly different formats to satisfy the needs of different applications, the organization does not have a system.