Your strategy’s set. The program has the green light. Project planning’s in early discussion. Now comes perhaps the ultimate challenge – formulating a time and budget focused plan, successfully allocating resources and proactively managing each project through to successful completion.

How resources are allocated and monitored per task often predicates success (or the other extreme). One feature vital to having an advantageous outcome is visibility – benefitting project managers and the resources involved, as well as senior management reporting. 

Too often, manual processes are utilized, encompassing spreadsheets, pieced-together toolkits and similar means that don’t allow for full awareness of project task status and fiscal information, resulting in far less knowledge-sharing and collaboration amongst those involved. That proves problematic: causing unawareness of project status and an inability to monitor risks.

For most, adopting a single collaborative work management solution will help address this visibility need for all project stakeholders, by providing a consolidated view of all project, task and resource information. These three stakeholder audiences in particular:

1. Project Managers – The evolutionary flow of projects provides obstacle and opportunity. It’s beneficial to have consistency of each project’s planning process, with as-it’s-happening detail of tasks and the resources involved. Easy upload and monitoring of these moving parts provides an opportunistic view of actual resource utilization related to need, status documentation and financial updates. Allowing resource allocations to be optimized to facilitate on time and on budget delivery. Meaning, staying on top of project progress, performance and status has never been easier.

2. Resources – Awareness of activities and status amongst all working the project is undervalued. If there was real-time team notification of who’s-where-with-what, a smoother flow would be experienced by all involved. Project task information uploaded, viewed and collaborated, all within a single system, would end (or largely ebb) frustrating and costly information silos plaguing project success. All involved are fully engaged and aware of status and hourly allocations, able to provide their expertise in ways impossible to fully realize with manual processes (the dreaded spreadsheet circus). Team is back in teamwork.

3. Senior Management – Reporting templates and customization ability providing project overview, with drill-down capability as deep as one wishes to delve, is needed by these folks. Whether they’re in product/service development, product management, finance, accounting or the C-suite, they’ll all benefit by having convenient, real-time access to the project information they value most for ongoing strategic planning, organizational growth and profit.

Back to Mastering IT Projects.

Rachel Hentges
PMO Influencer
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Rachel Hentges

Rachel Hentges is challenging PMO leaders to think differently about their role. Rachel is the author of key industry related surveys, reports, blogs and more that challenge the status quo of today’s PMOs.