Arpan Shah, director of product management for Project kicked off the event this morning. Arpan welcomed us with a brief reminder of the events that paved the way towards project management as we know it Today over the past 100 years. From the initial thoughts around Gantt charts in 1910, to PMI lauch in the 60s and Prince2 in the 70s… In parallel to this evolution, we also saw the growth of tools to support this new discipline: initially standalone SW applications for project managers, and nowadays fully integrated projects portfolio management.So, together with the increase of the maturity of Project Management in organizations, tools evolved from a position of supporting « only » the PM to benefiting all projects stakeholders: Programme managers, portfolio managers, executives, sponsors, team members, customers, suppliers…
I retained from the following presentation delivered by Ludovic Hauduc, Programme Management for the work management products at Microsoft, 3 key drivers that were behind Project and Project Server 2010: A simple and intuitive user interface, Unified Project and Portfolio Management within a single server product and an extensible platform for partners to build upon.
1. Simple and Intuitive User Interface: « after all, the first competitor of MS Project is MS Excel ! » started Ludovic Auduc. Many of the improvements brought to the user interface of Project 2010 come from a concept that could be called « back stage ». The MS Project engine is indeed with this new version taking the back seat and letting the PM do more if not all of the driving. When the PM needs the power of the scheduling engine of MS project, he/she will get it upon demand without having it forced on him/her. « Sharepoint Server is at the heart of Project 2010, in fact, Project Server 2010 is a Sharepoint application and developments done for Project are also enriching Sharepoint » continued Ludovic. The new web interface for Project editing has become as rich as the client version and is an asset for global deployment of functions widely used by many team memebers on projet: statusing and timesheeting.
2. Unified Project and Portfolio Management within a single server product. The unified server enables flexible project capture and initiation with customizable workflows to implement the required governance, portfolio analysis and portfolio optimization. The goal has been to open up project server to many more people in the organization that PMs: executives, team members, sponsors, partners…
3. an extensible platform for partners to build upon: With features such as connectors to enable partners to add functionality on top of Project and Project Server.
The morning continued with demos of some striking features of the so called « twentyten » 2010 versions of the toolset and partners testimonials.
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