Environments for collaboration and project management in business automation

I had a long question. Why is the introduction of project management tools in Russia more difficult than in the west? Recently, I realized that the reason is not the separation of the project organization from other types of businesses.

To understand the role of the tools of “project management” and “collaboration in projects” (collaboration tools), it is enough to understand the place of projects in a particular business. What is the ideal structure of a project-oriented organization?

When the main production process is “projects”, then each project, as a living organism, is included in a wider business context. In this “broad” context, we can highlight:

1. CRM and sales
2. Financial support for projects
3. Legal support of projects
4. HR, personnel service
5. Maintaining a "working environment" environment. What the office manager does
6. IT service, the main purpose of which in this case is project productivity.
7. Communication with contractors, outsourcing, freelancers
8. Communication with customers

Naturally, business in turn is included in a much larger context of the state, markets and other elements. We will not consider them.

Team as an internal project structure

So, the internal structure of the project is his team. Team consists of

• Of experts
• Support staff
• Project manager

Experts are the main driving force behind the project. Actually, those who invest their knowledge and efforts to create a product. These can be programmers, architects, marketers, consultants, depending on the industry.
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Supporting personnel are those people who do all the work, without which the main product of the “experts” cannot be called a product and sold. In software development, for example, they are testers or technical writers.

In organizations with a matrix structure, both experts and supporting personnel are often employed, in addition to specific projects, also in “supporting” business activities. That is, they participate in projects and in the operating activities of the entire company.

Project management system? A place!

So what is the place of the project process support systems? What should she provide? In such a scheme it is

• interaction of the "internal" circle of the project among themselves
• project management
• minimally necessary interactions with the "outer" circle

The most important relationship with the client and contractors, including their inclusion in the project team (in the case of customer on-side or freelancing). Therefore, connections to these two “external” sectors usually become part of the project itself. The objectives of implementing a separate system for project management are obvious. This is the maximum use of the team’s potential and focusing on one goal. Increase productivity, speed and quality of projects. Through the use of both communication tools and project management methodologies.

Again complexity

Returning to the main question. What is the complexity of implementation? The difficulty is that often they try to “shove” and maintain the outer circle, that is, the tasks of any of the supporting areas, into the project management systems. This is natural, because automation standards currently exist only for finance, and partly for CRM / sales. Thus, project management tools are used for processes not inside projects.

What kind of “bridges” should connect the project management system and external services? Usually this connection is either in the form of “contacts” from the sales department, or “incidents” for the office manager, or “reports” for the financial department and HR.

"Bridges" and the work of all services in the same environment are possible. But the separation of “projects - services” should be clearly visible at least to managers when deciding on the implementation of the system. And then you can answer the question, what exactly should be automated in the first place. And how to tie everything into an integrated environment.

Fuh! Understood! What you want.