Project Management Tools Recap

October, 2000

In comparing the various organizational tools available in construction, one quickly realizes a revolution is taking place.  Traditional software like Primavera’s Expedition and Meridian’s Prolog have quickly been trying to change to compete with the new web-based applications. The disadvantage of the old systems being the access to the data. Being able to get key information on a project from any web browser is quickly becoming the standard of our the construction industry. 

The heavy licensing costs of the old systems are evolving to subscription based services with better features, at a fraction of the cost.  Instead of owning expensive software that frequently needs to be updated, it has become more affordable to pay a monthly subscription to a system that is constantly being updated. Smaller firms that could not afford the expensive LAN systems are finding they can get better control and be more competitive with the new web-based applications.  Big firms studying these market changes are realizing they need to wake up or smaller companies will be able to outperform them. Startup costs, training and interaction with existing data are the big hurdles.

Advancements are fueling the effort toward change.  Team members are accepting e-mail as the new communication tool. Bandwidth is being improved. Just as the fax machine was adopted in eighties, e-mail is now intertwined into how we conduct business. 

Today we are seeing the evolvement of service providers, not unlike the “timeshare” idea of software that failed thirty years ago, but with powerful differences.  These new generation service providers are armed with the powerful data centers like exodus and uunet, security of data has improved so that by a password, you can manage your project from anywhere that you can access the net. The Gartner group, Forrester and Forbes predict that software as we now know it will be replaced by these custom services in the next four years.  These services are quickly evolving to be molded to closer to the real work flow, eliminate the inefficiency of duplicate data entry .  Owners having tried these systems, have experienced the savings and will be insisting on its implementation.

Why trust another organization to house important data through an outsourced provider? Few can afford to build data facilities with the backup power and redundancy expected.  It’s too expensive to manage all the data 24 hours a day, seven days a week and provide the support needed to an entire team The cost of providing technical staff has risen sharply as the next generation companies have increasing demand, with a scarce supply of qualified technicians.. Hubs go down, switches fail, .  Who wants to be responsible to manage all the hassles? And liable to an owner for system failure? The new specialist- the ASP is emerging.

Having vigorously test driven various ASP models the past six months, few yet offer the complete solution that is desired. Some have stemmed from the heavy functionality of the stalwart systems (Expedition and Prolog), others are more design focused (Buzzsaw, Bricsnet, Viecon) and all are currently laden with to many steps and data entry processes.  But things are quickly changing.  Programmers are listening to project managers with a focus on what counts: Managing the multitude of cost issues so they easily roll up into a budget, managing data in a central location so that all jobs can be easily monitored and the eventual interaction with accounting.  Systems that intuitively allow the whole team to input data will emerge as the leaders because they save time. Flexibility to control who sees what and ease of generating auto reports is another big feature. Keeping things graphically simple and flat improves speed. 

The great benefit is that we all as users help mold the tool as it can changes as you use it without the need to buy the latest version or to take the system off line.

I have formed a user group in the construction industry where we all share information. Research on the leading systems is posted on a web site (asptip.com) where there is no advertising and we pledge vendor neutrality (we don’t push one system over another). We use it as a sounding board to tell vendors what we like and don’t like about various systems.