While some Project Portfolio Management (PPM) tools automate some of the required project and portfolio status report, when we developed PPO we automated a number of the key project management documents that an organisation would mandate their project managers to complete.
It’s common practice for the project management office (PMO) to be tasked with introducing timesheets for the organisation’s projects. Irrespective of why timesheets are required, we’ve put together a few things for the PMO to consider.
In Part 1 of this two-part series, we discussed the what, the why and the how of Data Quality. We are now going to expand on that by giving you examples of metrics and monitoring that have been implemented by our clients on their Data Quality journey. The monitoring dashboard in PPO is a great tool to use to evolve your Data Quality metrics. The standard Monitoring Dashboard already provides some of the basic metrics to ensure that your users are logging in and updating PPO as required. We can help you take this further and tailor the metrics to support the monitoring that you would like to do
Data Quality ensures that information on hand in PPO is up to date and relevant. It is a measure the PMO can use to ensure that reporting is thorough and regularly done. It is also a tool that the Project Manager can use to consistently manage their project professionally and according to the reporting standard of the project management office (PMO).
Delivering projects more often than not involves multiple resources who need defined activities with a clear start and end date to get the work done. The hardest part is usually communicating and managing progress and timelines to your stakeholders. And that’s where PPO comes in. PPO enables project teams to see all of a project’s tasks in one place and is a great tool for the real-time reporting of project progress.
The RAG acronym stands for RED, AMBER, GREEN. These colours make up the traffic light colours used by most project managers to convey their subjective view of a project’s status. A RED traffic light normally indicates there are problems on the project (or an aspect of it); AMBER indicates there are issues that are being dealt with by the team but acts as a warning, and GREEN generally indicates that everything is okay.
One question that comes up regularly from programme and project managers is “How do I group my related projects and programmes in PPO?” The answer depends on what you want to achieve by grouping them.
You have probably noticed that whenever you update items such as Health Indicators, Comments Risks and Issues in PPO, the “Action / Response” is cleared of the previous comments in that field. This can be frustrating to a user who maybe just forgot to update another field like the Risk Owner or Follow-up date when previously editing. This auto clear function is a setting that can be changed, but before making this change, the pros and cons of doing so should be weighed.
