Management for Management Woes
By Bill Pitzer
Managing a project is never an easy task. A project manager must not only keep track of resource utilization and the status of various tasks, but must also be able to retrieve and report this information in a timely fashion. When you include the difficulty of trying to coordinate activities that are dependent upon each other, you can see why the project manager role has become accepted as a very crucial part of many projects. In the past, project managers had to fight just to get a little respect, because the job was often viewed as merely additional overhead ("Rodney Dangerfield Syndrome").
Luckily, in addition to respect, project managers now have several great tools available to help them manage, interpret, and report on the multitude of information they receive on a daily basis. In this article we'll look at two leading enterprise project management tools: Microsoft's Project 2000 and Computer Associates' SuperProject 5.0/Net 1.1. Both claim to be complete solutions for managing enterprise-wide projects and making the best use of the power of the Internet.
Getting Started
Both products are designed to run on the popular Windows platforms and both require a Web server of some kind to enable Web-based reports and updating features. For a very limited number of users, both packages support a lightweight Web server such as Microsoft Personal Web Server. However, for a large enterprise-wide application, you'll definitely have to look into a more substantial Web server, because the "personal" versions have very limited capability for supporting multiple users.
