It comes down to what Project Management maturity your organisation has or wants to achieve. Project Server is an 'Enterprise Project Management' system so it is designed to provide a suite of business benefits to an organisation. For example:
- Data Visibility across the entire portfolio of projects across the organisation
- A uniform and consistent approach which conforms and compliments your organisational Project methodologies and processes
- Demand Management
- Resource Management (Capacity and utilisation reporting)
- Project Team collaboration capabilities. (Project site, list registers, security model, document management capabilities, version control, alerts, search, etc...)
- Portfolio Management (Ability to assess projects against organisational strategic drivers, perform what-if scenarios and project selection processing)
- Schedule Management (Work break down structures, cost, duration, work, timelines, etc...
- Business Intelligence and Reporting Capabilities (SQL reporting, OLAP cubes, several reporting tool options for designing reports)
- Time management and task status reporting from project team to project managers
- Ability to create custom project workflows to guide project managers through the project lifecycle
- Robust and flexible security model
SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise edition is a pre-requisite for Project Server 2010 so in addition to all this you also get the full set of SharePoint enterprise features to take advantage of. A bit of Bing/Google Kung-Fu will explain all this in detail. Bottom line is this is a serious enterprise project management solution for any organisation out there wanting to increase and streamline their Organisational Project Management Maturity. Whilst this level of project maturity is the ultimate destination for an organisation, it does however take a huge amount of effort and commitment for it to succeed. It is not a turn-key solution. It is a business enabler. In my opinion, completely worth the investment! With the enhancements made to Project Server 2010 it is now positioned to be a ‘Big Boys Toy’ and also the reason for it being one the leading EPM solutions available on the market today.
Agree or disagree? Feel free to make comments below and share your views on this post.
