Next Generation Project Management Systems, Part 1: Needs and Motivation

For the past several years, the authors have managed moderate-sized software development activities in a jobshop environment using various commercially available project management systems. Experiences with managing projects using these systems has led to a thorough understanding of their strengths and weaknesses, and an understanding of the need for extensions and enhancements in a next generation project management systems. This paper presents the requirements that were synthesized through these experiences. To demonstrate how a next generation project management system should perform, the authors developed a prototype compound application, P++, using commercially available highlevel, object-oriented tools combined with a small amount of procedural programming. Use of P+ to manage ongoing software development activities has confirmed the requirements for a next generation project management systems. The construction of P++ is discussed in Part 2 of this paper.