Project Management Solution.

Managing projects effectively has never been more important in today’s highly competitive and turbulent markets. Without access to up to date accurate, real- time information about the status of projects, senior executives may have to make key decisions based on assumptions which may be damaging the business.

So, let’s try to break down what an organization really needs to run its projects:

• A solution that will help business leaders to evaluate project requests and evaluate each request based on ROI, on alignment with strategic objectives and on the comparison between potential risks and benefits. (Portfolio Management)
• A solution that will help manage the management of the “project planning” process, the implementation and finally the execution, ensuring that the projects maintain the phases and times allowed, that are within the budget, and have the functionalities prefixed. (Project Management)
• A solution that allows project team members, easy participation and interaction with the project management process. Requiring team members to “jump through hoops” or forcing them to become project management experts to complete a task can only do one thing: discourage them from participating. (Collaboration)
• A solution that gives business leaders real-time access to data, that verifies that decisions made in the board room are then carried out by project teams, and that ensures that the data analysed is accurate and updated information to then be able to make decisions future. (Real-time information)

For each of these four points, we can highlight three obvious requirements that each project management solution must include in order to make its work methodology as effective and efficient as possible:

1. It must meet the needs of the project teams: If the project teams do not have an easy and intuitive way to enter data into the system periodically and accurately, they simply will not. No matter how sophisticated this project portfolio management product report or dashboard can be. If it is not easy to use, it will only lead to inaccurate and outdated information of low (or zero) value for the company.

1. It must meet the needs of project managers: helping project managers to manage processes does not mean forcing them to manually enter status changes to solicit executives. Rather, it means automating all project information so that each time a team member updates a status, the information automatically becomes updated and enclosed in the appropriate report / dashboard, so managers can spend more time helping team members to be more effective and efficient, and less time to enter data and create reports.

1. It must meet the needs of executives: That is, they must assist senior management in making the correct decisions. By formalizing the project selection process, it is possible to ensure that decisions made by business leaders are a direct consequence of the analysis of particular information extrapolated from the system. This allows you to decide, for example, in a portfolio of projects, which to pursue and which to abandon, making strategic decisions supported by data and not by instinctive reactions. In modern economics, business leaders have an ever-growing need to know what is going on in the organization at present.

How do your project and portfolio management tools meet the needs of managers, project managers and project teams?

Gulit Upadhyay

This article was provided by Gulit Upadhyay, Sr. Digital Marketer at kytes, a company dedicated to providing Solar and EPC project management software so that you can achieve business excellence.