Planning Softwares in todays Project Management - Research Proposal Example

According to PMBOK, skills, knowledge and techniques applied to meet the scope, cost and time requirement of a project is called Project Management (PMI, 2004). The company has no formal project management processes set in place; however, they have heard about project management software tools that can help manage projects and reduce the failures. According to a survey by the Gartner Group, PM software tool vendors who also provide consulting services and support have annual revenue of $800-$900 million and this market is expected to grow by up to 20% each year (Liberatore et al, 2003).

Another survey by Pollack-Johnson et al (1998) shows that almost all project management professionals use some kind of project management software to assist in their project management activities. Raymond et al (2007) and Brodar et al (2007) have conducted research indicating that there has been significant contribution of PMIS in successful completion of their projects. The rise of SaaS (software-as-a-service) project management tools such as aceproject.com also indicates the high demand for such tools in the market.

However, desktop applications such as Microsoft Project and Primavera still dominate the project management market in particular industries (Liberatore et al, 2003). Although research su. The management agrees strongly with recommendation of Ahlemann et al (2006) - "the software for planning and controlling projects should be user-friendly and, by all means, should fit to an organization and its method of doing project management". Hence they are skeptical of investing money in expensive software unless they can find out that it can really help reduce project failure.

On a broad level, this research study will be conducted to help the management make this decision.AimsThe aim of the research project is to understand whether project management software tools can help implement project management in an organization while reducing project failures and automating manual activities and processes defined by project management standards.Objectives The objectives of the research are given below;To understand the need for project management and associated software tools in the case companyTo understand how project management software tools can be used to automate the existing or recommended project management processes for the company.

To understand whether the case company is ready for the implementation of project management software tools To understand the issues that may come up during the implementation project and how to overcome themTo understand the factors responsible for successful implementation of project management software tools Research Design (including method) or critical approachProject management is a broad topic and many standards and associations are available on the subject. To limit the research, therefore, the researcher will only study the de facto standard of project management, PMI PMBOK and PMBOK's related literature to understand the activities and processes defined under the nine