Almost every organization past a certain size has one. It arrived somewhere between three and eight years ago, it cost considerably more than anyone says out loud, and it has an internal nickname that only half the company can expand into actual words.
And the project managers still keep their plans in Excel.
The word for that is adoption. As in, adoption has been disappointing. As in, perhaps we should look again at training.
There is a simpler explanation, and it does not require anybody to be a technophobe. The project managers read the tool correctly.
They are not sentimental about software. They will use anything that makes delivery easier, including a spreadsheet, a whiteboard, or a shared folder with sensible file names. Nobody has ever had to run a training program to get a project manager to adopt a shared folder.
So when a tool gets quietly refused, the refusal is information.
Where these tools come from
Ask around any organization that has one, and the story is nearly always the same. The initiative did not start in the delivery function.
It started with a problem that is completely real. The numbers were late, or inconsistent, or they arrived in fourteen different spreadsheet formats. Month-end took two weeks. Nobody could answer a plain question about committed spend across the portfolio without three people and a phone call. Then Audit made a finding, and somebody said the sentence that begins these programs.
“We need a single source of truth.”
That is a Finance sentence. Not a criticism, just an observation about where it comes from.
So the requirements get written by the people who have the problem. Controlling, Finance, Audit, sometimes Procurement. The evaluation criteria are theirs, the scoring matrix is theirs, and the demonstration that decides the shortlist is a month-end close.
The project managers are consulted. Usually. Somewhere after the shortlist has been agreed, in a session described as a user group, at which two candidates remain and the contract already has a signature date in it.
The input is genuine. It is also an afterthought in the precise sense of the word. It comes after the thought.
And then the thing gets named. Not Portfolio Financial Control System, which is what the requirements describe. It is introduced as a project management tool, and from that moment, everybody in the organization believes that is what was bought, including the people who bought it.
An army you already employ
Here is the arithmetic that makes it attractive, and it is worth admiring before criticizing it.
Correct numbers need somebody to enter them. Finance cannot enter them, because Finance does not know what happened on the project. The only people who know are the project managers.
There are a great many of them. They are already on the payroll. And crucially, they are not in the Finance budget.
So the data collection is distributed across the delivery organization, and it never appears as a cost in anybody’s business case. The larger the project management population, the better the deal looks. An army you already employ is free, as long as nobody counts the hours.
They are not being asked to manage projects with this tool. They are being asked to supply it.
Actuals and forecast
This is the part that costs real money, and it is not about anybody’s feelings.
A finance system records what has happened. Actuals, committed spend, invoices received, hours booked. Backward-looking by design, and it has to be, because that is what an audit is for. Accuracy about the past.
A project is run forwards. What will the remaining work cost. Which risks are still open and what are they worth. What happens to the date if the supplier slips a month. How much contingency is left and what is it held against. Not one of those can be derived from actuals.
So the project manager spends an entire afternoon entering last month into a system that will not help with next month, then opens Excel and builds the forecast there.
The organization now has two plans. One is complete, current, and auditable. The other is the one being used.
The fix is not a better tool, and it is certainly not more training. It is honesty at selection time, and it costs about an hour.
Write down who the tool is for, in order. If Finance is first on that list, say so plainly and let the business case be a finance business case. It will probably be a good one.
If it is genuinely meant for the project managers, put project managers on the selection panel with a veto, rather than in a user group convened after the shortlist.
Test it on the forecast instead of the actuals. Ask the vendor to demonstrate a re-forecast after a risk has materialized. Move the date, reprice the remaining work, show the effect on the total and on the contingency. It is the most informative twenty minutes of the entire procurement.
Then count the data entry. Hours per project manager per week, times the number of project managers, times the rate they are charged out at. Put that figure in the business case beside the license cost. It will not be the smaller of the two.
The gate
None of that happens, so the rest follows on rails. Training and a dashboard showing tool usage by department, which is a small monument to the problem all by itself. And then, every month, the polite instruction.
“Can you make sure it is up to date before the 3rd working day of the month?”
Up to date. Not correct, not useful. Up to date.
The Greeks needed a horse because the walls were high and the gates were shut.
Nothing here was shut. The gate was opened from the inside, by people who had read the specification and believed the name on the outside of it, and what came out has been doing exactly what it was built to do ever since.
It is doing it right now. Day 3 of the month.