Microvision Inc. is at a crossroads in its evolution. The Bothell, Wash.-based company has spent the five years since its founding developing retinal image display technologies for consumers, surgeons and, potentially, military applications. Until recently, most of the projects at Microvision were outside contracts and sponsored U.S. government development programs. But during the past year, the company has begun adding some internal R&D and product development to the mix.

"The number of individual projects—for everything from the device level up to the full system and product levels—has increased dramatically," explains Allen Earman, Microvision's photonics section manager and default project management specialist. "I think we probably have more projects ongoing right now than the total number of engineers working here. And they're quite diverse. It just got to the point where the management of all these projects and the limited resources we had here became intractable."

Microvision's retinal scanning display (RSD) is a wearable or head-mounted display device for looking at computer or video information. The idea is to display text or graphical information by scanning a beam of colored light directly onto the retina of the user's eye. Users see the objects and data displayed "transparently"—that is, they can see through it to whatever lies beyond, such as a patient during surgery, or an airport runway.

In addition to showing, say, a "blueprint" of a patient in the center of a surgeon's field of view, an array of additional patient data, such as blood pressure and heart rate, can also be displayed on the perimeter.

The technology on which the product is based, called Virtual Retina Display (VRD), grew out of the University of Washington's Human Interface Technology Lab. Still in the experimental stages, a device based on the technology was first used at Kettering Medical Center in Dayton, Ohio, by surgeons performing brain and spinal surgery.

Scrambling for Bodies

With a staff of 125—more than half of them engineers—Microvision is a relatively small operation that has to make the most of its resources. It typically conducts about 75 concurrent projects, including everything from small capabilities investigations to multimillion-dollar government contracts. With so many independent engineering projects running side-by-side, resource managers were scrambling for bodies.

"We had single individuals assigned to 10 and 12 different projects at a time," Earman says. "You just don't get efficient work out of engineers spread that thin."

The company had been using Microsoft Project 98, which was no longer meeting its needs. But rather than abandon a product that people were already trained to use, the company looked for project management tools that would work with MS Project. Eventually, they found Project Office and Project Office Express from Pacific Edge Software Inc., Kirkland, Wash., both of which are designed specifically to integrate with Microsoft Project 98 or Project 2000.

"We evaluated a number of enterprise project management software tools," Earman says, "But they usually required abandoning Microsoft Project, which most of the people here had at least some familiarity with. In fact, the vast majority of people you interview or try to bring into a company like this have experience with that tool. We wanted to keep the learning curve small."

The Pacific Edge package works as something of a front end for Microsoft Project. The basic project management tool is the same, familiar software. Using Project Office and Microsoft's apps together, information entered in each is shared and automatically updated in a SQL Server database.

"Project Office allowed us to move all of that functionality to the enterprise level, where we can compare the time scales and resource needs of each of the individual project plans across the entire engineering division," Earman says. "It also allowed us to have a single common resource pool for the engineering division, so that when each of the project managers starts to initiate a new project plan, he can draw on that resource pool and actually see the availability of each of the individual engineers, technicians, etc., right from the beginning."

The company began by implementing the Project Office system last June. Microvision is beginning now to roll out the Web-based personal time-keeping module, Project Office Express, which gives users browser access to project information. The Project Office tools offer expanded views, greater ease of use, and higher scalability than Microsoft Project running alone. (Microsoft Project 2000, due to ship this quarter, will include a new add-on Web application similar to Project Office Express.)

The company currently has 35 users of Project Office, and Project Office Express is being rolled out to 75 users and eventually across the entire company.

"Being able to manage our resources across the entire company with one system has been extremely productive for us," Earman says. "It has allowed us to be much more efficient in our scheduling and synchronizing of projects and personnel."

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