Starting your PMIS journey - Part 4 - Support

Implementing a construction Project Management Information System (PMIS) for your organization can be extraordinarily complex and costly, without proper planning and management. In prior posts, we’ve outlined steps to follow to help you on your journey - Refer to the previous three articles where we outline Planning, Evaluating technology, and the Implementation.  

Now comes the often forgotten about part of your journey, Support.

Off-the-shelf solutions are pretty standard. Pay the monthly SLA, and off you go. You use the system how it dictates and adjust your processes around the system accordingly. You will need to monitor technology changes such as browser and device issues as well as storage, but for the most part, you should expect a consistent experience until you no longer do.

But what happens when you customize a solution? And changes to both processes and the system frequently occur, even after the system has been deployed? Over the past 11 years, we have seen this scenario play out in most, if not all, of our clients since our solutions can be highly configured and customized. There are some considerations to plan for before and after you implement the system.

• Finalize business processes. You should revisit the business requirements documents and update them to represent the processes currently being used. Include adjustments as needed during the change control process. These documents feed training and are crucial to establishing scope management controls after implementation.
• Establish a ticketing system. Make sure to establish a user ticketing process for collecting system/user issues. Ensure the ticketing system has enough data points to analyze the trending of requests by functionality, category, time to respond and close tickets, responsibility, and severity. This data will help target future enhancements, drive accountability, improve training and documentation, and ensure the users get the most out of the PMIS.
• Develop a Knowledge Center. Identify information and resources that you can provide for users as a ‘first port of call’ for support. This includes FAQs, videos, and documents, of course, but also consider establishing a Center of Excellence and encourage key users to make themselves available to their colleagues for community support and knowledge sharing, helping to triage many issues before support tickets are created.
• Implement change control. A change control process will be essential to prioritize new enhancements and fixes, update training material and requirements, and schedule future migrations and implementations. 
• Develop a roadmap. Develop an enhancement roadmap for the system based on priority and cost-benefit analysis. Also, evaluate related technologies that are affected by the PMIS roadmap, such as versions of Microsoft Office, Adobe PDF, browser versions, etc.  
• Simplify where needed. Frequently, the implemented PMIS can be overly complex for the users. After using the system for six months or so, pause to review. You may need to swing the control pendulum back to provide some flexibility in what needs to be tracked in the system, as opposed to using other tools such as Email and Excel. Also, consider minimizing redundant functionality that may exist across all your systems and/or can be replaced with the new PMIS.
• Survey users. Reach out to users to find out what works and what does not work in the PMIS. Capture lessons learned and any suggestions for improvement. Also, surveys will help identify opportunities to adjust training based on responses.
• Communicate to users. Make sure to establish regular communications with the users about, system issues, changes in their processes, planned enhancements, and upcoming training sessions as needed.

Hope these tips will help you on your PMIS journey. Make sure to check out the prior articles of this series where we provide some upfront planning steps, technology to consider, and implementation strategies. Stay tuned, in future posts, we will provide management tips for construction organizations to ensure the entire process stays on track.

If you have any questions and/or are looking for an enterprise PMIS for Microsoft 365, visit us at LydonSolutions.com and submit an inquiry for a free consultation. Good luck!