How people select project management software

The term “project management” in time has acquired a more and more wide and hence vague sense. Once this term would be resolved in a methodology, today its meaning has merged with “groupware” and “personal productivity software”. It is noticeable that there has been a collective and quite uniform move, so that methodologies, needs and software have been evolving towards a common new idea.

So most people classifiable as searching for "project management software" actually search a web based application that will help them manage and share what their group has to do at work. So if for example one searches for “project management software” on Wikipedia, gets a long list, and there are several applications that may be said to meet the problems evoked above. Then, which one among the possible ones should one choose? Well, I’m not going to get here into details of which to pick, it often depends on what you need. But in my by now considerable experience in the field, there are two ways of selecting software: those that try it, and those that don’t. Yes. It’s not a typo: there are many companies that want to select software without trying it. It works this way: in a badly managed large company, often a public service, some high ranking manager decides that the company needs a project management software. They put together user requirements, which by itself would be a good thing, only these requirements come from people without any experience in motivating people to use software, such as groupware, where there isn’t the prescription which leads people to use say an accounting tool. So they throw in restrictive and cumbersome features that no real group of people will ever adopt, but that makes them look responsible to even higher officials.
Notice that they also presume (wrongly) that having a local domain knowledge of the problem implies that they know the best way to get help in managing it from the software.
They have the habit of getting all software made custom for them, even when there are perfectly viable (and much better made) low cost and shrink-wrapped solutions for their problem.
Now that they have the specifics, they should go on and try a list of software solutions. But here too they have very bad habits: they are used to buying software not because they really need it, but because someone goes there and convinces them that they need it. So they ask some IBM-like shiny shoed fellow which visits them periodically whether he/she has some solution of the sort, and of course the fellow says yes, and demos an incredibly old and complex system which is actually a fake web façade of an outdated project management system, which does almost nothing, is unusable, and most importantly is sold ridiculously overpriced, because it has to pay the Porsche and the continuous trips to the customer of the fellow. They would go for that, but.. they have the corporation standards, that “no software should be bought without evaluating alternatives”. That you need an internal regulation to state what is dictated by very basic common sense, testifies the esteem of the company for the intellectual quality of its managers :-D

So, an alternative, how does one go for that.. that other ridiculously overpriced solutions salesman is not coming this week, oh dear. Let’s check the internet.

They find the list on Wikipedia. Of course they don’t try the software listed, that would mean working, and worse of all, taking some responsibilities for the choice. So they just send a badly written Request For Information (these people love acronyms), attaching the file with their absurd specifics, and pretend to be called (they still use the phone a lot).
Now I enter the picture: because up to very very little ago, we were so stupid to call back them, resulting in a huge waste of time (on our part); for their part, they got from us a detailed answer to the RFI, satisfying the company standards, and of course they always go for the local ridiculously overpriced local provider, so they can minimize responsibilities; they didn’t know what they were talking all along, and fundamentally don’t care.

The same story happens when organizations pay another one to do the software selection for them, just with even lower quality in the process: they carefully avoid really trying the software, they just want signed declarations of features present from software houses, so that they bear no responsibilities and can close the job quickly.

This can happen in any organization, and is not necessary linked to large size; and in fact, the opposite happens at times: I provide a positive example that I observed amused recently. A bank was looking for a project management web solution, and the directors involved were putting together more and specifics and system integration requirements. But the single director who was responsible for starting the adoption, simply ignored the requirements: chose the software that looked better to him, that cost almost nothing, and simply started using it in his small group. People started seeing how effective it was, and more and more people joined in, also those of the groups that were still meditating on the specifics and integrations; the solution, without any custom development is today used by 80 people every day, and the total cost would not pay a wheel of the Porsche of the shiny shoed fellow above.

Back to the question of whether software gets tried in evaluation, there are even “software houses” that think that in opacity there is an opportunity. When you are evaluating a software though its web site and you find it hard to get to the demo and/or the price, and that they try to get in contact with you first, they try to call you back, just consider for a moment what is happening and why: isn’t it very likely that the quality of the software is not sufficient to expose it and its price? And who is going to cover the (huge) overprice of having professional salesman calling you back? Those that end in the trap, of course.

Attribution: picture taken here.