Whether you're new to project management or a seasoned professional, it can be helpful to have resources, such as white papers, from experts in the field. Project community experts, including Microsoft MVPs and partners, have submitted the following white papers for our "From the trenches" collection. These white papers contain useful information that can help you plan, implement, use, and maintain your enterprise project management (EPM) solution.
From the Trenches white papers
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White paper |
Description |
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7 Ways to Sustain Adoption of your PPM Solution, Post-Implementation: white paper |
Describes key areas you can focus on to sustain adoption of your Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) solution—post implementation—until usage of the new PPM tools becomes part of organizational culture. By Prasanna Adavi (PPM, MCTS, MCITP MCT) a senior Enterprise Project Management (EPM) consultant and trainer, as well as an experienced Project community expert. |
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Discusses using strategic drivers in Portfolio Management to effectively create a standard approach for making important project decisions. By Project MVP Bill Raymond of Pcubed.com. |
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A phased approach to deploying enterprise project management: white paper |
Describes various challenges you can face when planning to deploy the Enterprise Project Management solution in your environment. It also describes several different deployment scenarios that can be used, as well as important prerequisites that need to be considered. By Chris Vandersluis of HMS Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. |
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Describes how enterprise system implementations are initially planned to address a static problem, but need to be able to adapt and evolve in their changing environment in order to become successful. By Chris Vandersluis of HMS Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. |
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Describes the challenges facing someone who implements Enterprise Project Management (EPM) in an organization that uses a matrix project management environment. By Chris Vandersluis of HMS Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. |
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Beat the Half-life (t 1/2): Governing Your PPM Solution, Post-Implementation: white paper |
Describes how to set up a framework to setup a governance model for your Project Portfolio Management (PPM) solution. It also includes a sample governance plan that could be used as a starting point to set up your own governance strategy. By Prasanna Adavi (PPM, MCTS, MCITP MCT) a senior Enterprise Project Management (EPM) consultant and trainer, as well as an experienced Project community expert. |
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Describes how prospective software purchasers can make interactions with software vendors more effective by applying easily understood business analysis methods. It walks you through an exercise that can help create software evaluation criteria by effectively determining what problems need to be addressed by the software solution. By Chris Vandersluis of HMS Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. |
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Describes how project managers can share bad news about their projects most effectively and with the least damage to themselves. By Chris Vandersluis of HMS Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. |
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Cancelling a project without cancelling your career: white paper |
Describes best practices for recognizing when a project should be stopped, the benefits of doing so, and considerations you need to take into account when cancelling the project. By Chris Vandersluis of HMS Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. |
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Describes best practices for defining your organization's charge code structure for the project management system or timesheet system. By Chris Vandersluis of HMS Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. |
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Describes how to create an Enterprise Project Management (EPM) deployment plan. It identifies phases and major points in an EPM Deployment plan, and it estimates times for each, based on a mid-sized organization with several hundred EPM system users. It also identifies factors that can affect the estimated duration times for each phase. By Chris Vandersluis of HMS Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. |
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Describes some of the common challenges you may face when deciding to use dashboards in your EPM environment. It describes how the prettiness of a professional-looking dashboard might sometimes hide the need for users to look into the quality of the data — "pedigree" and updated data, for example. It mentions how data for dashboards should go through an approval process to ensure high data quality and completeness. It includes a few techniques to prevent people from skewing data under their control to misrepresent the data that is displayed in the dashboard. And finally, it states some basic rules you should take into consideration when you create dashboards for EPM. By Chris Vandersluis of HMS Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. |
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Describes operational best practices for enterprise systems generally (including Microsoft Project Server). It notes how, although enterprise systems strive to provide an easy-to-use interface at the user level, the technology and infrastructure required to provide it is often very complex. This white paper then describes how this complexity requires you to use some basic best practices that give you the best chance of maintaining a high degree of reliability in your enterprise system. By Chris Vandersluis of HMS Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. |
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Describes how organizations need to understand the problems they are trying to solve when deciding on implementing a project management system. Sometimes deploying a centralized project management system may not be the best answer. By Chris Vandersluis of HMS Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. |
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GPS assistance in roadmapping an EPM deployment: white paper |
Describes how to make an Enterprise Project Management deployment "roadmap" when you plan to implement EPM. It uniquely describes factors to consider when you plan your deployment path. By Chris Vandersluis of HMS Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. |
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Describes the differences between a pilot program and a proof of concept, and what to consider and expect from an enterprise evaluation process. By Chris Vandersluis of HMS Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. |
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Describes challenges in different aspects of resource management and provides suggestions on creating a resource management system. By Chris Vandersluis of HMS Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. |
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Discusses ways to avoid issues during the implementation of an enterprise project management (EPM) solutions. By Chris Vandersluis of HMS Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. |
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The challenges of selecting enterprise software: white paper |
Describes problems in the traditional "Request for Proposal" (RFP) method that companies use to select enterprise software. It also describes problems that can occur if the "Proof of Concept" or "Pilot" method is used improperly. Finally, it provides some suggestions for creating your own effective enterprise selection process. By Chris Vandersluis of HMS Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. |
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Describes the importance of having executive involvement for a successful Enterprise Project Management (EPM) deployment. It describes reasons why a company might choose to not involve an executive in the deployment, how executives should be involved in the deployment, and tips on how to effectively involve an executive in the deployment. By Chris Vandersluis of HMS Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. |
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Describes how as organizations mature, they can be more effective in the use of their project management systems. It describes how it might be more effective for companies to elect to use only certain aspects of a new project management system to a level with which they are comfortable, even though they are tempted to use every feature that is available to them. As the company continues to mature, it can become more advanced in its use of the features that it needs to use. By Chris Vandersluis of HMS Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. |
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Discusses common mistakes that are made in project schedules and offers practical advice. It provides practical advice and recommendations that are relevant to any version of Microsoft Project. By Kevin Watson, PMP, MCT, MCTS. |
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Describes some common challenges you may face when scheduling projects. It describes coming up with the best approach when you try to determine how long tasks should be and how many tasks there should be to optimize a project schedule. It discusses how different industries typically require different types of schedules (for example, software development, EPM (engineering, procurement, and construction), and plant shutdown). It also discusses several factors in choosing project resolution (for example, length of project, resources involved, management or division of resources, speed and effort required in collecting data, and data update schedule). By Chris Vandersluis of HMS Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. |
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Discusses project management, portfolio management, and task management, and it compares the top-down and bottom-up management practices related to them. By Chris Vandersluis of HMS Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. |
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Describes the advantages to tracking project work, discusses tracking methods, and explains the difference between tracking time and tracking progress. By Chris Vandersluis of HMS Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. |
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Discusses how organizations should approach deploying and supporting an Enterprise Project Management solution. Includes considerations to help ensure that your solution (the "drill") addresses your organization's specific needs (the "hole"). By Chris Vandersluis of HMS Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. |
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Discusses the evolution of project management systems, describes the use of Enterprise Project Management, and discusses the importance of understanding which project management solution is best for you. By Chris Vandersluis of HMS Software, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. |
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