I work for Hundsun Technologies which is a Chinese domestic software company that has in the past few years been building a global services business.  With customers in the USA and Europe we have focused a lot of effort in continuously improving our communications processes.  We currently have a project underway to integrate a set of tools to support effective communications.  On our projects project management, architecture and design is typically performed by onshore Hundsun staff  and detailed design, development and testing is typically performed at our offshore development center in Hangzhou, China.

Since 1998 we have sold enterprise (and now SaaS) resource, portfolio, and project management software.  One of the most popular features has always been our weekly project and program status reporting tool where the project manager can set the Red/Yellow/Green health status of schedule, scope, resources, budget, and overall project.

What is scary (to me) is that many of our customers want to “over-ride” the Red, Yellow, Green indicators and take health status reporting away from the project managers.

I agree with setting some threshold guidelines around the dimensions of resources, scope, budget, and schedule.  I don't believe they should be cut and dry rules that automatically place the project status.  Let me explain. 

For example they look at our issue logs for aging issues, the number of scope change requests, the deliverables & tasks for late starts, milestone slippage, and resource availabi ...

These days many people are talking about Software as a Service (SaaS).  Software as a Service (SaaS) is the concept of instead of buying a server, buying server software, configuring said software, and keeping up with maintenance you simply pay a software service provider a monthly fee to deliver the benefit of the software over the Internet. 

The advantages of this approach are:

• No large capital outlay (servers, enterprise software)
• No resource management issues (training staff to install and support software)
• No footprint on existing hardware (no software to install on desktops and no storage issues)
• Pay as you go and only as you need (you only pay for the people using the software and there are no internal scaling issues)

Unfortunately, many SaaS offerings have unacceptable underlying hosting problems.  They run on servers outside the datace ...

Q:  When should a company use software as a service (per user/per month with hosted hardware and software)?

A:  Whenever possible.

True story.  Yesterday in St. Louis we had terrible storms and a tornado warning for downtown (very rare here).  I was in the middle of a demo and ended up huddled in an interior hallway with the CIO talking about this very subject while we waiting for whatever would happen.

It was hard for them (very old company) to make the transition to SaaS but he knows that they must.  He explained that resources were limited and no one considered it a career path to support someone else's software.  The support costs are very high as vendors have to travel on-site and the support is slow.  Then there is the cost of the hardware, energy costs to run / cool the hardware, the operating system/db/supporting software, etc.

I explained to him that ...

The past two weeks have been enlightening for me.  Two rather obvious events reinforced my own thoughts on a couple of topics.  I was in my office on the 12^th floor of an office building in Hangzhou when the earthquake in Sichuan happened.  Sitting at my desk I began to feel queasy and considered that I was having a medical problem before I realized that the building was noticeably swaying.  Having lived in Southern California for 10 years I wasn’t particularly distressed and quickly concluded what was going on.  ...