Constructing an Optimized Project Performance Management Solution

Jul 24, 2014

With the World Cup over–and what a great final match it was!–Brazilians (once they get over their team’s collapse) will surely refocus on the huge overruns in  cost and un-readiness of the building projects associated with the event.

The projects you manage may not match the scale of those in Brazil, and might not even concern the construction industry, but the experiences and challenges will be familiar: trying to keep track of progress, costs, resources utilization, timeliness, “at completion” and other important KPIs. You probably rely on some standard reports obtainable from your ERP system, especially if is tuned for project management, and maybe you use Crystal as well. That said, it is a certainty that you and others on your team rely heavily on good old Excel for all kinds of project reporting, analytics and planning.

Like so many others who use Excel to run a business, you will also have first-hand knowledge of its over-runs, utilization headaches, and increasing unmanageability. Essentially, a spreadsheet-based system will always topple over for at least these reasons: Excel is a personal, not a collaborative productivity tool (even if you are using SharePoint); there is no direct connection to underlying data, and; the complexities of your own business will overwhelm even the most cleverly multi-tabbed rendering of a project management model.

That’s not to say that Excel cannot be part of a solution—more on that momentarily. The point to make here is that an ERP, a report-writer, and Excel, in any combination, will never adequately address system requirements for robustness, flexibility, and collaboration.

What is needed is a fast way of organizing financial and non-financial metrics together, in a modeling environment that can accommodate Project Managers, the Finance team, and any other key project participants. […]

View Full Post – Constructing an Optimized Project Performance Management Solution
Source – PARIS Technologies Blog