New project-portfolio management tools and corporate efforts to squeeze more out of IT have thrown gas on an area of business strategy that has been burning low and steady for more than 20 years. The tools of the trade are much more powerful, but the rules have changed little. "Plan the work, then work the plan," says Vern Stultz, the manager of cost and scheduling for the infrastructure and technologies group at Parsons Inc., a worldwide engineering and construction firm that, among other things, is rebuilding the infrastructure in Bosnia.

The push toward project-management discipline where human assets are the key material (think IT) has been seen as an opportunity for asset-management companies, including most of the professional-services automation providers, to offer powerful analytic tools for project, financial, and human-resource tracking. This is the area that many analysts and enterprise resource planning vendors expect to grow the fastest in the next five years.

Strategic partnerships and acquisitions, such as Primavera Systems' imminent acquisition of professional-services automation vendor Evolve and Niku's acquisition of scheduling vendor ABT, will ultimately lead to project-management suites that can be tailored to each customer's needs.

In the meantime, the verdict is that you need to get your project-management goals and discipline started before you buy any software. "If you wait until you've got a perfect project-management process, no tool will fit perfectly," says Forrester Research analyst Margo Visitacion. "On the other hand, it makes lots of sense to review and buy while you're in the process. Why have two steep learning curves?"

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Illustration by Peter Bennett