Project Management
Challenge
A project is defined as a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a discrete product or service. The success of projects relies on the ability of project teams to produce results within the defined constraints of scope, time, and cost.
Often project sponsors do not participate in the planning process and thus do not have any understanding of the key tasks, project risks and other issues prior to the project kick-off. Without a detailed project plan and standardized performance metrics, the project timeline will often slowly slip one task at a time, making it difficult to take corrective action and ensure the project is delivered successfully. Often the complexity of interrelated tasks and the constraints on resources can take the project well beyond the accepted time frame and the quality of the deliverables can be compromised. Organizations can address these challenges by investing to enhance their project management maturity.
Solution
The Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution provides project sponsors and project managers with the appropriate project management tools to proactively plan and effectively track complex projects to a successful conclusion. Microsoft® Office Project Professional 2007 helps ensure project managers control project schedules and finances, collaborate with team members and utilize powerful reports to effectively communicate the project’s health to sponsors and stakeholders throughout the lifecycle.
Project Initiation & Effective Planning
The Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution provides project managers with project management tools to effectively estimate each project’s schedule and resource requirements and forecast the cost for each phase. Project Management Offices (PMOs) can publish project templates to standardize and streamline the estimation process across their organization. Project managers can select the appropriate template when initiating a project and are automatically provided with an outline that includes all the required tasks, generic resource assignments and custom fields. The project manager can then quickly customize the project plan to amend task dates and durations, identify resources with available work on the project, highlight inter-project dependencies, and capture issues and risks before creating a baseline for the plan.
Alternatively, project managers can initiate simple web-based project proposals in Microsoft® Office Project Server 2007. Project proposals include descriptive information, a lightweight project schedule, and a resource plan for forecasting resource requirements. Once approved, the project proposals can be promoted to full project plans and updated through Office Project Professional 2007.
Enhance Team Collaboration
Integration with Office Project Server 2007 ensures project plans can be shared with the team in a familiar, web-based environment for effective project management within the Microsoft Enterprise Project Management Solution. Tasks can be easily linked to issues, risks, documents and deliverables, providing a rich collaboration environment and creating an immediate impact at the “nuts-and-bolts” levels of project teams. Team members can increase their understanding of required tasks, as well as readily grasp the project status. All team members can be focused on the same objectives, even when those objectives are changing. Project Server 2007 combines a set of project plans into a consolidated view, enabling high-level visibility around the allocation of people and resources and allowing this information to be placed within the context of an organization’s project portfolio for sponsors and stakeholders. This knowledge helps project managers and sponsors determine the possibility of achieving projected timelines and the proper staffing levels.
Measure and Track Performance: Office Project Professional 2007 provides a variety of project management tools designed to help project managers gain control and effectively manage projects throughout the project lifecycle.
Identify Task Drivers: Task drivers highlight all variables, such as dependencies, calendar constraints, and resource constraints that could affect the start date of a task providing a “breadcrumb” trail to help identify the root cause of a particular delay in the schedule
Visual Change Highlighting: Change highlighting ensures that project managers can quickly see the tasks impacted by an update to the plan, by automatically highlighting each cell
What-If Modeling: Project Managers can use the multi-level undo feature to confidently model changes, assess the impact on the plan and quickly return to the original state with certainty
Utilize Office Project Professional’s flexible reporting infrastructure to effectively communicate project issues and performance to all stakeholders.
Integration with other Office technologies: The Microsoft Enterprise Project Management Solution allows users to smoothly export project-related data into Microsoft® Office Word 2007 for formal documents, Microsoft® Office Excel® 2007 for custom spreadsheets and charts, Microsoft® Office PowerPoint® 2007 for crisp presentations or Microsoft® Office Visio® 2007 for diagrams
Professional Reports: Visual Reports is a flexible reporting solution that uses Office Excel 2003 or later and Office Professional 2007 to produce professional charts, graphs and diagrams based on Office Project 2007 data. The client side cubes contain all project data allowing the project manager to easily create reports to gain a deeper understanding of the project’s resources, costs and schedule. Project managers can choose from a library of out of the box reports or create custom reports and even save the new reports as best practice templates to improve future project management efforts.