In a new series called Future of Project Management Software I will be talking with PM Software vendors about their view of the future. To get us started, I had a conversation with Bastiaan DeBlieck and Bart Stevens from TenForce, a Project Management Software company located in Belgium.

What, do you think, Project management Software will look like in 5-10 years?

The project management solution in 5 to 10 years from now will change dramatically. A lot of the intelligence which resides in the heads of smart people and teams will migrate into the software. A lot of thinking will be done for you … It could even move to a model where the current PMO will be replaced by some sort of one line Virtual PMO, where you will select resources from a pool of experts. These people will then work on the projects …. Think about HAL in 2001: Space Odyssey …

What are the technologies that will be driving the software?

The SaaS model will be the predominant way to distribute the project management software. The software will be hosted centrally and incremental updates will be made available to all users. AJAX technology will make the web based solution fast and extremely user friendly. Semantic web and OWL will be the method to capture expertise and make it available through the project management solution. The project management solution will drive the project methodology trained (PMBOK, Prince2 or company specific) throughout the organization. This means that the system will actively urge project teams to do something when required based on the project methodology and data from the system. The team will no longer have to check documented procedures to know what to do. These technologies will also be the foundation of mechanisms to exchange expertise.

How do you think tools will support proper communication between mobile, multi-cultural teams?

In tomorrows world, we think that, due the "flattening of our world", virtual teams will increase tremendously. Thanks to standardization of a lot of aspects of PM, the cultural aspect will be reduced. As a result of the opening of lots of information on the Net (Web 2.0), transparency is going to be the keyword for the future. Features that today are limited to pure social web 2.0 communities, like Facebook, will become available in project management solutions. They will allow the distributed team members to communicate personal goals, moods, attitudes and believes thus helping to overcome cultural and geographical barriers to establish solid collaboration. All this combined, SaaS, Web 2.0 and transparency leads to very informed virtual teams in different countries, time-zones and cultures

How do you think tools will build a sense of community?

Project management tools will provide means to exchange intelligence and expertise on all levels and all aspects of the project management environment. A project management best practice can be bought from project methodology brokers or presented on share best practice websites The project methodology defined in New Zealand to engineer a certain type of plastic can be picked up by somebody in Brazil. She can pick up this best practice and adapt it to the local needs. On site project management consultants will only deal with the real problems. Teams, managers, organizations and consultants will publish methodology items. Having acquired such a best practice you will be able to activate it in your project management solution. Thus you can tap, in a dynamic way, from the knowledge and expertise of many others around the world.

How do you think tools will keep the team focused on the overall goal?

Organization goals will be defined and distributed through the management tools. Whether in the form of a balanced scorecard or anything else they will be embedded in the organization. Every individual activity will directly or indirectly (through projects, programs) be linked to these goals. In this way a network of relations will exist wherein the result of every individual activity can be accounted for in terms of the organization goals. This structure will lead to maximum transparency on the organizations performance for every team and every individual.

How will decisions be supported (about features, about allocation of resources)?

As discussed earlier project management expertise and project management methodology will be embedded in the project management solution. Based on the phase, activities going on, the risk category of the project, the status, the alignment of the project with the strategic goals, ¦ the project management solution will suggest to execute certain steps or it will start certain activities.

What makes your current product different than other Project Management Software?

TenForce is a pragmatic project management solution that starts from the day to day operations. It links this operational reality to organization goals and objectives and it centralizes all activities (project and operational). In this way work can be defined, distributed and followed up in an intuitive but structured way. The TenForce GUI is extremely user friendly and allows immediate deployment with minimal training effort. Already today TenForce allows the creation of process/activity templates to capture expertise. This is only a part of the immense amount of expertise that will be made available through our project management solution in a DYNAMIC way; based on the technologies mentioned earlier.