Businesses today need every possible competitive advantage to maintain their position and, ideally, to get ahead of rivals in the scramble for success. This means that only the right projects should be undertaken, providing the most benefit to the company, and that resources are available to complete those projects. In order to determine all that, a set of practices and processes can be applied which allow organizations to manage all projects in synchronization with the company’s overall strategic objectives. Here are some of those processes which can help to ensure projects are successful.
Project Management
The main idea of project management is to provide as much relevant information to a manager as possible for the purpose of keeping a project on track and on time. Project management software helps a manager assign task accountability, resolve conflicts, promote collaboration among members and teams, and identify cross-project dependencies.
Resource Management
Just like it sounds, this aspect of the business effectively allocates resources to the various tasks that make up a project, so that visibility is given to resource utilization and any gaps can be identified and resolved. This not only ensures that all tasks have resources assigned, but that the assigned resources are the right ones for those tasks.
Financial Management
The financial aspects of any project are critical to its success, and must be incorporated into the overall plan accordingly. Ideally financial management software can integrate with a company’s Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, so that charge-back processes and reconciliation are facilitated.
Work Intelligence
Work intelligence is an invaluable part of Project Management that makes use of detailed data and rolls it up at various levels to suit the business need of any number of management. Business performance can thus be evaluated by charts, graphs, reports, scorecards, and dashboards. The end result of all this information and evaluation is to gain insight and intelligence for current performance as well as future planning and execution of projects.
Team Collaboration
When team members and project managers can collaborate and share information in a unified, secure environment, they can be far more effective in their respective roles, and can assist each other rather than waste time on redundancies. Team collaboration software can manage all communications, tasks, calendars, documents, issues, threaded discussions, postings, and even polls. A great deal of time and effort can be saved with a single source like this containing literally every aspect of a project, and access to all information can be assigned at various security levels to ensure proper controls.
Dynamic Applications
Practically every business has processes unique to itself, even if the business is a common one. When these processes are important to Project Management, and need to be included as part of the company’s methodology, Dynamic Applications can be used to build the special processes into the overall project management scheme.
One good example of this is a company’s business rules, which might need to be factored into some or all projects undertaken. Part of a good Dynamic Applications package is a workflow engine that can include these business rules when they are appropriate for a given project, and remove them when they are not needed.