How much are you willing to waste in solving your project’s performance puzzle?

Many of the projects intensive organizations continue to waste their most valuable resources time and effort to solve their current projects’ performance report puzzle. A report that is a must to provide the insight to make informative decisions that could impact a project’s performance budget, completion date, quality of work among many other project’s success objectives. With the growing projects’ complexity, change dynamics, contractual obligations, lower profit margins, less attractive opportunities, delivery risks among others, organizations cannot afford not having real-time single version of the truth project performance report.

Projects’ senior resources continue to waste their time in consolidating, reviewing, verifying and analyzing the reported projects’ data that are usually captured in fragmented MS Excel files to solve the project’s performance puzzle. Those MS Excel files which are usually managed and populated by the different project team members might have different form and format in reporting the captured data. There will files to capture RFIs, Submittals, NCRs, Permits, Safety Incidents, Meeting Minutes, Daily Reports, Change Orders, Potential Change Orders, Progress Invoices, Material Deliveries among many others. In addition, those files are never designed to capture all of the important data included in project’s communications. For example, the RFI log will not include the question, proposed solution and answer fields. In addition, those MS Excel files will never provide the access to the supportive documents such as drawings, pictures, etc. and links to other relevant project’s communications. Further, those files will never reflect the current real time status of those communications as the assigned project team member needs to collect those communications and update the fields in MS Excel. This adds an additional challenge which is to ensure that all MS Excel files used in the report have the same cut-off date.

Using Project Management Information System (PMIS) solutions like PMWeb, those projects intensive organizations will have a single web-integrated platform to capture all projects’ data along with all supportive documents in a pre-defined workflow steps to formalize the submission, review and approval of reported data. This will ensure the trust-worthiness as well as timely reporting of project’s data which will eliminate the manual processes of preparing the relevant project communication form, for example RFI, attaching all supporting documents, distributing the RFI to the intended recipients and then logging the part of the RFI data in the MS Excel file. This data will provide the content of the pre-defined project’s performance reports to enable the project’s executive to analyze, visualize and share project information in any form and format.

Capturing Everyday Projects Data

PMWeb comes ready with most of the everyday forms needed to manage a project including but not limited to request for information, meeting minutes, daily reports, submittals, transmittals, safety incidents, budget, contracts, change orders, progress invoices among many others.

In addition, PMWeb custom form builder allows creating unlimited number of new forms that PMWeb might not have by default. The custom form builder can be used to create non-compliance report, request for inspections, audit reports, permits, executive narrative report among many others. Those input forms can be in English or any other language, Latin or Non-Latin.

Since these forms would have repeated type of data that should be standardized across all forms within a project or even across the complete organization’s portfolio of projects. PMWeb allows creating pre-defined lists of those values not only to ensure consistency and correctness of captured data but also to speed adding this data by the different project team members.

PMWeb security rules will be used to enforce accountability on captured data by setting the right access rights for the different project entities and team members for using those forms. This could include access rights for each form at each project as well as access rights for the fields within the form itself. PMWeb audit trail captures the details of all those users who have accessed PMWeb along with the details of what actions they made and when.

PMWeb customizable online help allows the organization to access an extensive help content that explains how to use each form. When the user clicks on “?”, PMWeb will open the online help manual to provide the needed knowledge. This editable online help can be used by the organization to customize the help manual to align the content with the project management procedures adopted by the organization.

PMWeb document management repository allows the organization to upload the different documents such as drawings, pictures, videos, manuals and others that are usually attached to the above project communication. Folders and subfolders are created to match the project’s filing system structure as well as to limit access for each folder. Document attributes and redline comments can be added to each uploaded document.

To enforce transparency in submitting, reviewing and approving the captured data, PMWeb visual workflow will be used to map those steps for each form. The visual workflow can include branches and conditions to match the level of authorities assigned to each project team member as it relate to reviewing and approving or rejecting project management processes.

Reporting Single Version of the Truth Project Performance

All of this captured data will be stored in PMWeb database to provide the real-time content needed for the different performance and status reports needed to monitor and evaluate the projects performance. Tabular and graphical reports as well as dashboards can be designed in the desired form and format. Those web-enabled reports and dashboards will become available for the intended stakeholders anywhere, anytime using any device.

Nevertheless, this is not the only benefit those stakeholders will get but they will be able to drilldown for additional details on the reported performance information all the way to the input form that was the basis for the reported information. This not helps in building trust on what is being reported but also provides the details and links to other records that could be related to the reported information. Of course, filters can be added to those reports to limit the selection of the data being reported on. This provides decision makes with the insight to make better and faster informed decisions.

In addition, the project team can use interactive business intelligence and data visualization applications like MS Power BI, Tableau, Qlik among many others to provide in depth analysis of the captured data and identify trends and correlations between the data of the different processes captured in PMWeb. For example, the analysis could identify if there is a relation between the volume of RFIs raised and change orders that could have an impact on the project’s budget and completion date. In addition, the same analysis could also run all projects managed by the organizations to identify additional trends and correlations. 

Conclusion

With the growing projects’ complexity, change dynamics, contractual obligations, lower profit margins, less attractive opportunities, delivery risks among others, organizations cannot afford not having real-time single version of the truth project performance report. Projects intensive organizations cannot continue to waste their most valuable resources time and effort to solve their current projects’ performance report puzzle. Those organizations understand that the project performance report is a must to provide the insight to make informative decisions that could impact a project’s performance budget, completion date, quality of work among many other project’s success objectives.