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This is the first of several blog posts in which we will evaluate Software as a Service (SaaS), Project Portfolio Management (PPM) software solutions.

During this evaluation, we primarily looked at solutions for small and mid-sized businesses (SMB), and project teams. We loosely define the SMB space as companies with between 100 and 5,000 employees, or between $20 million and $1 billion in annual revenue. More importantly, we looked at tools which are appropriate for organizations with an IT staff of less than 500, fewer than 20 project managers, and no more than 50 concurrent projects. Larger organizations should consider enterprise level solutions. Although some of the products we looked at will support enterprise implementations, there are several other products that we are not covering here.

The following are among the products we initially evaluated at a high level. About half of these we already have some familiarity with. From this initial set of PPM SaaS products, we selected several for a deeper dive and evaluation.

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I did a Google search on “Project Managers are” and was surprised with what Google revealed as autosuggestions:

Top results are: Idiots, Responsible for, Useless, and Stupid!  Three out of the four are pretty cynical to put it mildly.  I certainly do not want to be generalized into these negative buckets and I’d bet nether do you!  Here are some qualities a good PM should possess that will help change these stereotypes.

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After spending the better part of a decade managing projects for large Fortune500 organizations. I recently had the opportunity to consult and project manage for some small companies. As you would expect that there are positives and negatives in both, and the disparity can generally be seen with team size/support and decision processes.

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Networking is often thought as a ‘pre or post’ by-product of attending a PMI dinner, lecture, or a business meeting. Often we skip the networking portion because we are in a hurry to get home. Instead it is important to be able to dedicate the time to improve our professional relationships, learn from our PM peers project experiences (both good and bad), and discover if there are new techniques that could be applied to your own projects.

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This month, HIMSS released the 26^th Annual HIMSS Leadership Survey, which gathers opinions of IT professionals in healthcare provider organizations regarding their use of technology.
The survey revealed that 72 percent of respondents report that consumer and patient considerations, such as patient engagement, satisfaction and quality of care will have a major impact on their organization’s strategic efforts over the next two years.

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The 2015 HIMSS Mobile Technology Survey of more than 200 healthcare provider employees’ further supports the fact that use of mobile healthcare technologies is spreading fast.

We are in the final week until the regular season the National Hockey League comes to a conclusion. Teams are fighting for playoff positions, but our attention is drawn to not the top of the standings but to the bottom. The “race” to 30^th place has caused a lot of discussion on sports talk radio and national publications. Sharp focus is on the current last place team, the Buffalo Sabres. Fans are divided on whether the team should deliberately try to loose games, in order to get a chance at the number one draft pick, or at worst the number two draft pick (per the NHL’s draft lottery rules). As a project manager, I took a broader look at this event in Sabres history, as the fan opinions steadily grow apart. Although sports fans will always have varying opinions, what has been missing is a solid project Stakeholder Communication Plan.
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