Insights

When should a company consider custom project management software?

As I browse through postings for one off projects on various sites including a number of freelance sites, I am struck by the number of posts I see where companies are looking for built from scratch custom project management tools. To answer my own question (when should you consider custom project management software?), I would say the answer is: almost never. Here’s why I strongly believe that:

First, there are hundreds of quality project management software tools in the marketplace (and I recently wrote a blog post highlighting what you should consider when choosing a tool that will be the best fit for your company). There is a lot of diversity in the tools available whether it is tools that are tailored to agile methodologies or traditional Waterfall methodologies. Many of these tools have exhaustive configuration capabilities whether one of your key requirements is to integrate with XYZ software or whether you need to be able to create your own project templates. More and more tools are offering native integrations, which creates a lot less hassle than having to go through a third party integration tool. Since there are so many solutions available, it is highly likely that a company has a solution that addresses most (if not all) of your key requirements. As I will explain shortly, if a tool doesn’t have what you feel is valuable functionality, I would question whether it is project management software that is truly called for to meet your company’s needs.

Second, how realistic is a custom project management tool from a scalability and maintenance perspective? What happens if the developer who built your original custom tool is no longer available and the latest release of Internet Explorer doesn’t play nicely with your custom cloud project management tool? If this happens, you will likely find yourself paying a new developer not just to fix it, but to spend many hours familiarizing themselves with code they didn’t write and haven’t seen before. Contrary to popular opinion, this can be very time consuming and thereby very expensive. Even if your developer doesn’t change or leave the company and Microsoft releases an Internet Explorer update that breaks your application, you still have to pay your developers to fix it. I can tell you from first hand experience that fixing these compatibility issues with browsers whether it is Internet Explorer or Google Chrome can be very challenging and time consuming. I’m amazed by the number of business sites I still encounter here in 2017 that require a particular browser. I was on one of the most popular sites in the world the other day and couldn’t believe that the only way to get the site functionality I was try to use to work properly was to use Internet Explorer (It would not work with Microsoft Edge or with Google Chrome).

There are a number of other very serious issues that can come up that should be considered. What happens when you go from having 5 employees in your company using this tool to 30 employees using it over some time period? First, you have to train the 25 people on a tool that they have never used before even if they are experienced project managers or team members. Second, it raises the question of whether the tool will be able to handle a 600% increase in use and whether you have the infrastructure to handle that. What if you have a custom PM tool, but your customer only uses Microsoft Project and wants a project plan in MS Project (or a compatible format)? If that happens, you will probably have to find someone in your company who knows MS Project and can meet the customer requirement. They will then have to create a project plan in Microsoft Project from scratch and then you suddenly have two places where projects are being managed. Then, you will have people in your company trying to find project related materials in the custom software that are no longer there because they were done in Microsoft Project as a one-off. Next, depending on your company and industry, what about compliance requirements? This is another aspect of custom software that is often overlooked especially in the IT, Finance, Banking, Government, and Real Estate industries. These custom tools are all great in concept, but these are some pretty significant issues that can cause a headache down the line. Yes, I fully understand that using some of the freelance sites out there that custom software can be built at what many consider to be a low cost, but that low cost has an extremely high cost when you start to think about the issues described above (maintenance, management, and scalability).

Third, if you find that many of your requirements can’t be met by any of the hundreds of PM tools available, I would question whether you you need pure project management software to begin with. It may end up being that a tool that has a small project management module (such as a number of the CRM products) as part of a larger software package (that addresses a specific need) could be a better fit. Are you figuratively trying to fit 10 pounds of avocados into a five pound bag when it comes to your project management software? In this case, the avocados are features. I’m a huge advocate of companies consolidating the number of software tools that their team members have to use, but it is important to draw a line in terms of what should be a part of your project management software and what should be kept elsewhere. This is really a key point to understand. There are hundreds of project management tool on the market. What are the chances that there is true project management functionality your company needs that isn’t part of a project management tool on the market?

In getting into more detail on this point, let me raise two examples. Several months ago a company that I had worked with was implementing new project management software. They had pretty extensive enterprise requirements that spanned a number of different organizations. One organization decided that they want to use the project management software to manage time sheets. However, there was already an enterprise standard tool that all employees used to enter their time. Nevertheless, this organization decided to move forward in using the project management software for time sheets. In this particular case, these were all full time employees so there was not massive value in tracking time at the project level (Other than as part of capitalized salaries where applicable). It certainly is nice to know, but I really questioned why it was necessary given the additional implementation costs that were incurred. That doesn’t consider the fact of throwing in another new element that team players had to learn in addition to a project management software that very few of the project managers had used before. In that particular case, I would recommend a company at the bare minimum defer the time management implementation for at least 6 months so that you are not throwing as many changes at one time at your employees.

For the second example which looks at the other side of the coin, let’s think about a company that uses another communication tool besides email. This could include tools like Slack, Skype for Business (Formerly Lync), and even Skype (personal, non-business version). Some companies have used alternative communication to tools reduce the number of emails that fly around. I have heard the sentiment expressed by many company leaders that they simply can’t keep up with the volume of email that they receive. While I understand that some really hate dealing with email as well as the challenges in keeping with large volumes of email, I really have a hard time understanding the resistance in accepting that it is the modern form of communication. I recently had someone tell me, “Email is the bane of my existence.” True to their word, that person was unresponsive to emails, but would respond to phone calls and texts. In this day and age, can you really afford to be unresponsive to emails? Most companies that don’t have dominant market share can’t afford that mindset. Nevertheless, if a company uses a communication tool besides email and then implements a project management tool with collaboration capabilities, do you really need 3 methods of communication? Can you reasonably expect your employees to manage communication in three different places? Is that the best way for them to be spending their time?

For all of the reasons described in detail above, I haven’t recommended a custom project management software solution to a client and would be very hard pressed to envision a scenario where I would do so. If you have all of your requirements for a tool laid out (and you absolutely should have all of your project management software requirements clearly detailed) and still feel that a custom tool is the way to go, I would encourage you to speak with at least three vendors and see if they have configuration options to meet your needs. I think you will find that a number of them do have options that will meet your needs and save you the long term headaches of maintenance, management, and scalability.