Our philosophy has always been to excel one area - Project and portfolio management solutions and services.
In the 1990s, there was a movement in the information technology (IT) industry called 'knowledge management.' During that time, many large and sophisticated companies attempted to develop software that would cover every aspect of business for an enterprise. It was an attempt to ‘be everything to everyone.’ Companies like Ernst & Young, IBM and many others poured millions into these efforts to develop software that would encompass every function of a business. At the end of the day, they found out that each customers had unique needs and an ‘out of the box’ solution was not feasible. Everything was custom and the movement failed miserably!
Today, there are solutions in the market that claim to excel in several business functions. For example, a common one in our project management software market space is the CRM-PM-Accounting combination. An ‘all-in-one’ solution is usually developed by a software publisher that has expertise in one specific area. For example, an accounting solution might have a project accounting module that stores high level milestones and provides a high level target budget. The solution does not provide task detail, intelligent scheduling and resource information that project managers need. While a project accounting module suffices for the accounting team, it is too light for the project team.
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution might have a way to assign tasks to the project team, but these tasks are not connected to a particular project, nor is there any intelligent scheduling. Again, the sales team is happy, but the project team is not.
Another example are product development lifecycle solutions that have a bit of project management. The issue here is similar in that the project side is weak.
We hold that a single vendor cannot be the best at developing software for every functional area of a business.
Of course there are high end vendors like SAP and Oracle that have end-to-end systems. If your organization is mature enough to benefit from an Oracle or SAP and you can stomach the large investment required, then that might be an option for your organization. Keep in mind that even these high end systems are modular and the modules are tied or integrated together. Also, the investment will be at a minimum a six-figure investment. (More information on the three tiers of project solutions.)
The Project Insight team believes the better strategy is to integrate ‘best of breed’ solutions, rather than trying to be great at all functions across the enterprise. Project Insight is focused on project management and its tangential functions which include resource management, document sharing, collaboration, project budgeting and reporting.
While Project Insight integrates with any ODBC compliant solution. Here are some examples of other best of breed solutions:
We believe that you will be better served by investing in a mid-market project management solution and a market solution for accounting, CRM, help desk, ticketing or other system, and integrating the systems.
How do we handle the best of breed approach? With our Web Services APIs. As a Microsoft Developer and Partner, our APIs are .NET based, following the standards of the industry.
Helpful Resources
Further Reading