The Feature

Interview with Randy Egger, the Father of Oracle Projects

February 4, 2008 on 2:06 pm | by Marian Crkon | In Conversations | 2 Comments |  Print |  Email

Let me introduce Mr. Randy Egger, one of the original creators of Oracle Projects, and the president and CEO of Projects Partners. We spoke over the phone about his company and its role in the Oracle ecosystem. Below are few excerpts from our conversation.

How did you end up an Oracle professional?

Back in the early 80′s, I was involved with the selection of a relational database that my firm could use in conjunction with application development. We selected Oracle and at that time the RDMBs level was at V3. I had studied and taken classes from CJ Date and Ted Cod.

When you were used to coding in assembly language using a b-tree structure for data management, Oracle was a godsend! I joined Oracle in 1986 (employee number 2048!), and was part of the 50 person professional services group. After one year of that, I ran the IT group for Sales when it turned a billion dollars, and then ultimately landed in Application Development where I spearheaded Project Accounting [now Oracle Projects] development.

Ten and a half years ago, I started Project Partners where we specialize in the implementation of Oracle Projects as well as provide supplemental products to expand its usage.

What are your current role and responsibilities?

I am a president and CEO of Project Partners LLC.

Do you get to do a lot of selling?

I am involved in ALL areas of the business.

Tell us about the beginnings of Project Partners. When did you know the firm “has made it”?

I started the firm out of my house 10+ years ago. Since I was the Product Director for Oracle Projects, I knew that the marketplace needed quality consulting services for Project centric firms. I also knew that Oracle Projects could use some extra features that would facilitate its usage. Knowing that EVERY company is a project company, and most companies just didn’t know it yet, motivated me into this market. I never ponder on whether this company ‘has made it’ or not.

So it is journey, not a destination.

Exactly. We simply put our best foot forward and work very hard at making companies successful with their usage of Oracle Projects. Success breeds success. We now have worked with close to 300 clients and the list is growing very rapidly. We work with about an average of 30-40 clients at any point in time. We have a wealth of information at our disposal.

I assume you speak with many Oracle customers. What do you see as their main concerns and needs these days?

A lot of companies are adopting a Project Management approach to running projects but have little practical experience with the discipline. We are helping companies to formally become project-centric, i.e. help with establishing a PMO office, processes, etc.

Another big concern surrounds usability. Oracle Projects is VERY feature rich and most business problems faced by project centric firms can be solved using the software. The problem is simply with the amount of steps, screens, and processes it takes to accomplish a specific business need. We are trying to help people to simplify the product to fit their business needs. It is about taking a complex product with many features and making it easy to use.

User experience is an issue with Oracle applications. Specific industries have specific terminology and processes. Software built around specific industries were successful and well adopted by the users.

I also believe, from a user experience perspective, it hurt Oracle to be anti-Microsoft back in the 90s.

Yes, if Microsoft did something, Oracle had to do the opposite.

And companies that adopted Microsoft standards became standards; like SAP for instance. The [Oracle] applications look and feel different and it takes time for new and old users to use them properly.

But it changed with the acquisitions. They made Oracle much better in the application space….

What kind of products and services does Project Partners offer? What distinguishes you from other consulting firms?

We offer EXPERT Oracle Projects consultants that have lots of industry experience. Since our company focus is in Projects, we work collaboratively to insure that all of our clients can benefit from our collective knowledge. We are NOT a body shop … the company cares about the success of our Oracle Projects implementations. Ninety nine percent of our clients can be referenced.

We also develop products that help serve the Oracle Projects community. We current have 4 products that satisfy Projects needs:

• OP3 – Integration with Primavera Project Schedules
• PIC Reporting – A comprehensive Project based reporting tool
• PIC Invoicing – Simplifies invoice formats as well as Invoice Consolidation
• PIC UI – A simplified user interface to Oracle Projects and other modules using spreadsheets

A lot of people still do not understand the integration between Oracle Projects and Primavera. They think they can do it themselves then find it more complex than it seems. We put a lot of time and effort into the integration. And we are doing a lot of work getting ready for the next generation Oracle Applications.

PIC Reporting and Invoicing are our best known secrets.

People assume it is in the core product.

When people buy Oracle E-Business Suite applications, they get an almost complete solution. Partner solutions are acquired by clients once they know enough about the core products to identify those areas in which gaps remain between their business needs and the core software. The Oracle ecosystem is a healthy one, in which Oracle delivers more than 80% of the fit, and partners deliver the rest.

PIC User Interface is our new product that will be formally launched later this year. We are taking Microsoft Excel and integrating it with Oracle [Project Management and Resource Management]. There will be workbooks working two-way between Excel and Oracle forms. Using PIC User Interface we consolidated 12 Oracle screens into one. This will revolutionalize the industry. We are getting some tremendous feedback. We have focused on two industries so far – Professional Services organizations and Engineering and Construction…

As an Oracle partner, you are filling gaps in Oracle’s product offering. Let’s take PIC with its reporting and invoicing enhancements, for example. Why is it that Oracle can’t deliver this fundamental functionality in its core products?

I believe that a lot the issues will be resolved within Fusion. Oracle Projects is a VERY complex application that crosses many industries. A project (or job) is a cultural thing to many companies. Project Managers have their own way of managing a project, and in this, they closely mirror artists. It is that creative power that can make or break a project (or project manager). You need tools that can help this process. You can have many many different types of projects within one organization and yet another set of project types in another organization within the same company. This is a tough problem to solve when you want one consolidated view that shows the health of a company that is made up of projects.

Which Oracle releases are your products currently compatible with?

We are compatible with most releases, specifically 11, 11i, 12.

How are you getting ready for Fusion?

We are currently studying the underlying technology. Our next generation Project Management integration software will be based on Fusion technology.

What is the best way for users to become familiar with your products?

By going to our website, attending the Oracle OpenWorld and OAUG COLLABORATE conferences, and requesting real-time demos. We also plan to offer webinars.

I guess that’s one of the reasons we are talking today.

Absolutely.

What do people not know about Projects Partners but should?

We operate globally; we now have operations in India and plan to expand into the Middle East and Europe. We have experts in technology as well as the complex FP-M data model. Our core competency is ORACLE PROJECTS (both functionally and technically). We manage full eBusiness Suite implementations for project centric companies. We handle small, medium, and large implementations.

Our best known secrets are probably PIC Invoicing and PIC UI. We believe that PIC UI will make Oracle Projects implementations VERY successful, especially for those companies that are trying to “field enable” Projects.

A couple of your associates recently started a company blog. Why?

Blogs will serve as an easier way of getting informal information out to our user base faster. It is a part of our knowledge transfer. One of our goals is to educate current and potential users on the benefits and the best ways to use the Oracle Projects products. Everything we do is geared towards this goal – including the Blog, access to our experts for quick questions, meeting with people formally and informally at conferences, etc… It’s this desire to share our knowledge that led us to sponsor the Center for Projects Excellence at the OAUG annual conferences. We staff the conference booth with our very experienced consultants, so that customers can come by and ask us their toughest questions, and get answers at no cost. We enjoy the open question and answer exchange – it’s one of the ways we prove that we are indeed The Experts in Oracle Projects!