TMCnews Featured Article

Project and process management have come a long way, farther than you might imagine. Remember the days of manila document envelopes with signature lines used to route documents between departments? (A military friend tells me they call them “holy joes”.) That’s about as far back as I remember process management, but in fact, it goes all the way back to the late nineteenth century, to the railroads. Though I suppose if you want to be picky, the construction of pyramids and Great Wall of China would have required similar systems.

But according to a history of project management put together by Microsoft (News - Alert), while constructing the transcontinental railroads, “Suddenly, business leaders found themselves faced with the daunting task of organizing the manual labor of thousands of workers and the processing and assembly of unprecedented quantities of raw material.”

Frederick Taylor later broke down the process of labor into basic parts, focusing on steel mills. Henry Gantt looked at naval ship construction to create his Gantt Charts and the government invented the critical path system during World War II.

Project management software existed as early as the 1950s, though running it was limited to computer technicians because of the complexity of the mainframes. Some of the first notice of computerized project and process management came with the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, opening discussions of process tracking and quality management. And we all remember how excited we were when Excel integrated its Shared Document function, allowing even the smallest businesses to create a simple, centralized spot for tracking.

Now project and process management software does everything short of pull in customers for you, but collaborative process management provider Comindware Inc. has still found room for improvement. Existing software is great for workflow but doesn’t do well at communicating across departments. You can route work through staff and contractors worldwide, but there’s no way to get the finalized data over to accounting, and things like parts ordering still have to be accomplished externally. Comindware’s new patent, which will be applied to its flagship Comindware Tracker system, will allow integration and crosstalk between departments, reducing the chances for error or omission in a busy work environment.

The newly patented method smartly shifts to allow managers multiple working scenarios; for example, listing members of a repair department as resources when creating a repair order but shifting those same employees to users to create parts orders.

Comindware Tracker also features proprietary ElasticData technology, allowing managers to make changes to a project, which then waterfalls down the system without interrupting current workflow requests.