Project Management

At work we typically use a computer program called Microsoft Project to manage our project schedules. We are all fairly comfortable with the basics but we use only a fraction of its capabilities. Our IT department took it upon themselves to not just upgrade us all to the latest revision(that was at our request, when some people upgrade but not others everything gets complicated) but to take it one step farther and get us to use their whole project management suite. In general, I enjoy these big initiatives and I think it makes more sense than barely using the tools that we are given. However, this time I resent having the IT department fix this problem for me. I've been working for two years on a suite of tools, that would have addressed this small piece of design process as well as our complaint files, our corrective and preventive action system, our discrepant material tracing and a host of other items. I can't lobby to add it in to next year's budget until August. By buying this software now, it weakens my case for why I need the other package. The project management portion is the piece that was to contribute the hard dollar savings that would make it possible to realize the soft money compliance savings.

It will take me a few days to get over being ticked and get on board. I will eventually be on board. I like the software, it just changes things I wasn't ready to change and doesn't provide the scope of what I really needed. Of course there was a very real chance that I wasn't going to get approval to spend the $500K on what we really need. This will be better than nothing.