Home > About Us > Expert View

View from an Expert

Geoff Reiss discusses his views on why successful organisations are turning to leading Program Management Solutions

Geoff Reiss, Chairman of 'The Programme Management Specific Interest Group', author of leading titles 'Project Management Demystified' and 'Programme Management Demystified" and Director of Product Strategy for PMG, discusses his views on why successful organisations are turning to leading Program Management Solutions.

The business world is changing rapidly and executives are under increasing pressure to deliver more with less. Organisations are confronted with the need to better manage complex resources, interdependent projects and programs, high staff turn over and rising overheads. Increasingly, they are looking to embrace the latest program management systems and techniques to remove barriers between their teams, departments and projects, shorten reporting cycles and liberate their use of management information. They need to align investments to business objectives, understand what changes can be made to optimise ROI, and exploit up-to-date business intelligence to tackle emerging opportunities.

The Basic Requirements

As a result, organisations want to tightly integrate project, program management and timesheets in one system. They want a simple, automated updated, overview of all the work in hand within the organisation throughout the world. By a simple click of an icon the whole program management team want an up-to-date summary of all projects, all departments and all non-project work. In other words, they are looking to remove the limitations of legacy technology and antiquated project management techniques and plan more intelligently - prioritising and monitoring the many overlapping and competing projects in a constantly evolving business environment. They want:

• An integrated solution. A system that manages high level planning, through detailed level planning and resource scheduling, to the input and management of timesheets.
• Up to date information. A system that offers complete visibility of work by enabling each plan to keep other plans up to date.
• Fewer nasty shocks. A system that can involve more people in an open and realistic planning system approach with fewer surprises. There may be bad news but organisations want advance notice to make it easier to handle
• Resource Scheduling. A system that automates the location of the right skills, expertise and experience and brings individuals together from various time zones and locations.
• Loaned resources. A system that removes the "two boss" problem allowing resources to be loaned/seconded to other teams for agreed periods
• Responsibility monitoring. A system that provides a complete audit trail of the delegation work, amendments, agreements, missed deadlines and overrun budgets.
• Integrated diary and timesheet. A system that ensures everyone can report their progress and estimates and for these plans to automatically update following their managers approval.
• Extensive consolidated analysis. A system that provides business intelligence such as actual versus budget, earned value analysis, and business performance metrics.

Criteria for success

Competitive pressures is forcing companies to better leverage all of their resources by making best use of their assets, managing their people- and information- based knowledge more 'intelligently'. They are looking to reduce operating expenses through faster team creation and unnecessary travelling and meeting expenses; effectively manage the communications and interactions between team members and senior management through collaborative working technologies; and remove boundaries by integrating external parties into the process of the organisation. To achieve this many successful companies are exploiting:

• Benefits / Portfolio Management. Allowing the organisation to model and analyse the real world effects of their business activities by creating relationships and dependencies between the resources, projects, contender projects, programs and day to day operations that it undertakes.
• Change Management. Modelling facilities that allow executives to undertake what if analysis and be aware of the consequences of changes to ongoing and potential future programs, projects, activities and resources, and their effects on the financial and non-financial plans and objectives.
• Expertise Management to automate the search for the right skills, expertise, availability, and interest.
• Intra- and extra-organisational collaboration through technologies such as workspaces, document management, instant messaging, calendars, event-based alerting and Q & As.
• Knowledge management. Capturing structured information such as document management, and accessing all other unstructured captured from the usage of collaborative tools.