SaaS PM/PPM ROI for a CIO of a Mid Market Company

You promised yourself you wouldn't do it.  You wouldn't look at your Blackberry during the Monday morning project update and prioritization meetings.  You just can't help yourself and decide to do a quick check of the company's stock price.  Ouch, down another 7%.  That will teach you for breaking your promise.

It isn't that you don't care what your directors are telling you, it is just that you can't DO anything with the information.

Every week it is the same thing.  Every project is "OK" everyone is "working hard", and every new initiative is "high priority".

You have questions in your head that you don't dare speak because you know that nobody has the answers.

How many projects are in Yellow or Red status?

Since 1998 we have sold enterprise (and now SaaS) resource, portfolio, and project management software.  One of the most popular features has always been our weekly project and program status reporting tool where the project manager can set the Red/Yellow/Green health status of schedule, scope, resources, budget, and overall project.

What is scary (to me) is that many of our customers want to “over-ride” the Red, Yellow, Green indicators and take health status reporting away from the project managers.

I agree with setting some threshold guidelines around the dimensions of resources, scope, budget, and schedule.  I don't believe they should be cut and dry rules that automatically place the project status.  Let me explain. 

For example they look at our issue logs for aging issues, the number of scope change requests, the deliverables & tasks for late starts, milestone slippage, and resource availabi ...

These days many people are talking about Software as a Service (SaaS).  Software as a Service (SaaS) is the concept of instead of buying a server, buying server software, configuring said software, and keeping up with maintenance you simply pay a software service provider a monthly fee to deliver the benefit of the software over the Internet. 

The advantages of this approach are:

• No large capital outlay (servers, enterprise software)
• No resource management issues (training staff to install and support software)
• No footprint on existing hardware (no software to install on desktops and no storage issues)
• Pay as you go and only as you need (you only pay for the people using the software and there are no internal scaling issues)

Unfortunately, many SaaS offerings have unacceptable underlying hosting problems.  They run on servers outside the datace ...

Q:  When should a company use software as a service (per user/per month with hosted hardware and software)?

A:  Whenever possible.

True story.  Yesterday in St. Louis we had terrible storms and a tornado warning for downtown (very rare here).  I was in the middle of a demo and ended up huddled in an interior hallway with the CIO talking about this very subject while we waiting for whatever would happen.

It was hard for them (very old company) to make the transition to SaaS but he knows that they must.  He explained that resources were limited and no one considered it a career path to support someone else's software.  The support costs are very high as vendors have to travel on-site and the support is slow.  Then there is the cost of the hardware, energy costs to run / cool the hardware, the operating system/db/supporting software, etc.

I explained to him that ...

With the economy struggling and companies tightening their belts we are starting to see more and more resumes of good project managers on the street.

Having been in the project management web-based SaaS software field for 10 years this seems like the 2nd time we have been through these challenging economic times.  The good news for our company is in down times our software sales actually increase as companies invest in systems to automate and replace people.  The sad part is knowing that is taking place and good people will be looking for work.

Well since we have no control over the Federal Reserve the one thing I can offer is a way to decipher the job postings they find so they know the "truth in advertising" behind some of these companies.

NOTE:  I literally lifted these off of the bathroom wall were many people post funny quotes and stories and am unable to attribute the original author.&n ...