Six reasons you need to invest in a best practices PPM System

WIIFM (What’s in it for me?)

As a company executive or a PMO manager you’ve probably asked yourself the crucial question:

Why should I invest in Project Online / Server or any other PPM system when my PM’s can manage their schedules using MS Project and I can compile my reports using Word, Excel and PowerPoint?

Life without a PPM System: do these pain points sound familiar?

• Inaccuracy: Have you found yourself in a situation where the project status reports generated by your PMs and your portfolio level monthly reports for your executives told a different story about the status of the projects?
• Lack of visibility: Have you been in a situation when the PMO, senior or executive management have minimal visibility of project progress due to project files living on various shared drives or worse, in employees’ old inboxes who left the organisation?
• Poor governance: Do you find that processes are generally not enforced or followed resulting in the failure of the PPM solution?
• Manual processes: Are your PMs spending long hours producing project status reporting?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, next time you meet with your boss, state your case for investing in a best practices PPM system with these benefits (trust us, your colleagues will thank you!)

Benefits of a PPM system

Benefit #1 Good governance: Project governance fulfills the role of ensuring that the most appropriate processes are followed to achieve the best use of your PPM solution. Monitor the quality and compliance to your project information including scheduling standards across all projects and resources in your portfolio.

Benefit #2 Efficient resource management: Having a centralised resource pool to build your project teams enables high quality resource supply and demand management.

Benefit #3 Don’t underestimate the importance of visibility: A PPM system provides consistent visibility of project progress to all levels of management as well as team members.

Benefit #4 Access across any devices enables extreme mobility: Work with other PMs online enabling deliverable and dependency management across various projects.

Benefit #5 Automation of previously manual processes: A PPM system automates mundane tasks and reduces duplication of work to help you deliver more projects on time and under budget.

Benefit #6 A tool is only as good as the quality of the information and data: A PPM system ensures that your data is of high quality by governing your organisational processes.

Our familiar friends MS Project, Word, Excel and PowerPoint are great tools, however, a best practices PPM system is more than just a tool – it offers consistency, visibility, automation, objective decision making, trust and governance.

By implementing a PPM system like Project Online, your PMs can continue to use MS Project to manage their project schedules and your organisation can reap huge benefits in project management, resource management, time sheet and task management, schedule management, program management, financial management, team collaboration, reporting and more!