|
Information Technology has become a tool to deliver competitive advantage for organisations operating in global markets. The IT department is frequently the birthplace for business tools and process improvements. Frequently, IT executives are tasked with balancing the demands of its business "customers" while maintaining alignment with overall business objectives. At the same time resources are frequently working across multiple projects and BAU (business as usual) assignments.
IT Department Challenges
- Little or no automated project, program or portfolio reporting. Project reports and information are manually generated consuming valuable time and resulting in inconsistent reporting: not a good use of limited resource time.
- No way of capturing project benefits realisation
- No automated, centralised resource pool to show and update resources' allocations and availability. Tools like Excel are used to track and manage resource commitments across the department. Such tools must be manually maintained, frequently hold out-of-date data, and do not support multiple user read/write access.
- No centralised reporting on project progress via, for example, traffic lights status
- Project cost management tracking is manual and inconsistent. Often project cost data is manually transferred from project management to ERP tools resulting in inconsistent reporting
- No single, easy-to-access, repository for project-related information such as documents, issues and risks. Such artefacts are often stored on network file shares that makes review and collaboration dependant on knowledge of where the items are stored
- Information duplication because project reporting is a manual process, data is often doubled handled/entered in different tools and systems (resulting inefficient use of valuable resource time).
Solution
EPM Partners responds to these challenges with its preconfigured EPM-for-IT-Departments package which delivers:
- project review, approval and selection workflows, with email notification and security controlled access settings
- cost estimate and benefit realisation templates including financial and non-financial considerations
- organisational project impact assessment matrix
- project selection and portfolio optimisation matrix including budget and resource availability constraints
- an enterprise resource pool, including teams, generic resources, cost resources and skills
- metadata and properties for portfolios, programmes, projects, resources and tasks
- BAU plans for managing resources non-project related work items
- Programs, Portfolios, Projects, Resources and Tasks online views and dashboards (including traffic-light KPIs) with the ability to export to MS Excel
- business intelligence (BI) Reports Pack of 10 reports
- defined security model
- the automated creation of template-driven SharePoint project workspaces where documents, risks, issues, change requests and other project data is recorded, version-controlled and centrally maintained
- time sheets and/or project status interface to capture resources efforts spend on project and/or non-project tasks
EPM Partners' EPM-for-IT-Departments combines the knowledge of an IT department's project management requirements with tool configurations to deliver a pre-configured EPM package. EPM-for-IT-Departments is available for internal deployment to the client's infrastructure, or through the EPM Partners On-Demand solution.
|
