A ‘ state of the art ’ Evaluation of PM – Systems exploring their missing Functionalities

Project management (PM) is crucial to successfully accomplished projects within their predefined goals. To support this process, project management tools are required to foster project members to minimize overruns in time and budget. The presented work is part of a three years project to add semantic technologies to project management for increasing its efficiency. To study the functionalities of current PM systems and for developing a semantically enriched software system, an evaluation of four open source PM tools was carried out. For this work, we started with an online research to obtain a list of the most common/available open source PM systems. Afterwards, we chose the four most common mentioned systems. In addition, qualitative face-to-face interviews with eleven companies, mainly operating in the IT domain, were conducted to reveal missing functionalities as well as usable information about lacks of current project management solutions. The questionnaire contained 27 questions concerning different category groups, such as “general information”, “tools & functionalities” and “(reusing) stored information”. This paper outlines strengths, weaknesses and problems related to current PM (tools). Results have shown that inconsistent data storage and incomplete up-to-date information of ongoing projects are critical issues, which are not completely covered by existing systems.