Working from home during COVID19 hasn’t slowed us down at ProjectControls.online (PC.o). We’re excited to announce a new major feature on PC.o: Portfolio Management, a space to integrate and summarize all your cost and schedule data and performance measurement, into programs, portfolios, projects, and sub-projects.
Overview
At ProjectControls.online, our core goal has been to create innovative but accessible solutions to solve common, long-standing industry challenges to make routine project controls more effective and efficient. In the process, PC.o helps make users more valuable in delivering projects. PC.o provides a suite of cross-platform, self-service online project controls tools that can serve small projects to multi-billion dollar programs.
In our last article, COVID19 | Rolling Re-Entry: Maximizing Look Ahead Schedules, we highlighted how PC.o’s Look Ahead Schedule module allows you to import, compare, merge, share, and create Look Ahead Schedules. Our CPM Schedule Services take that innovation to the next level, allowing you to import, view, store, clean, compare, analyze, and share schedules and analytics without scheduling software, i.e. Microsoft Project or Primavera P6.
Our latest feature, Project Portfolios, may be our most powerful yet. Serving as a dynamic enterprise portfolio system that combines the analytics of our CPM Schedule Service with program and project dashboards that summarize key cost and schedule performance indicators, in a nimble, user-specific enterprise project structure. Now, all your most relevant data is instantly available, online, on mobile, at your fingertips. Let’s look at how powerful this new feature is.
Enterprise Reporting
Every organization we have worked with and each project we have supported has required or desired executive-level reporting that summarizes at the highest level, cost and schedule information, with the goal of getting an instant understanding of project health. Typically, organizations are forced to decide between a custom solution or significantly changing their business practices and IT guidance to align with off-the-shelf software. Here are some of the challenges, which our new Project Portfolios module eliminates:
- Commitment to one scheduling software: our Project Portfolios section, just like the CPM Schedule Services, allows you to summarize schedule information from either Primavera P6 (.xer) or Microsoft Project (.mpp)—OR BOTH.
- EPS Rigidity: products that offer an Enterprise Project Structure (EPS) module force an organization to standardize how projects are organized for reporting. PC.o offers more flexibility with dynamic, user-specific enterprise breakdown structures that can be easily modified and summary data instantly recalculated. Parent-child relationships of Programs-Projects-SubProjects can be adjusted with a couple clicks and drags.
- Manual Override: The Portfolio or Enterprise level is often constrained to just a roll-up of projects within its structure. However, PC.o allows you to create baselines, assign milestones, and manage costs at the Portfolio level to supplement or supplant project summaries.
- Data Date Mis-Alignment: With other systems, reporting cost and schedule at an enterprise level often requires the alignment of data dates for all schedules and cost financial periods. PC.o eliminates that constraint, enabling the roll-up of the most current data available from every project.
Check out an example below of a Project Portfolio landing page, where projects are summarized and organized.
Project Dashboards
Dashboards have become an essential tool for project managers. The new PC.o Project Portfolios feature automatically builds intuitive, user-friendly dashboards that harness existing data from all your CPM schedules and/or other integration tools (PROCORE / AutoDesk BIM 360 Docs). These dashboards provide project managers the ability to gauge project health and quickly QC cost and schedule information without relying on just the scheduler. As shown in the example below, our Project Dashboards include:
- Project Overview: to contextualize your data, PC.o dashboards include areas for project webcams, images, maps, brief project descriptions, and progress update narratives.
- Cost Metrics: from either cost-loaded schedules, cost management integrations (PROCORE), or manual input, our dashboards offer focused cost status, budget comparison, performance measurement, and trend information in a quickly digested format.
- Schedule Metrics: our project dashboard also summarizes schedule information from your project CPM folders, focusing on performance, trends, and milestones.
CPM Schedule Services and Analytics
Our CPM Schedule Services module was designed to help schedulers be more efficient, add more value, and engage more people. Leveraging the power of our CPM Schedule Services, PC.o Portfolios are designed to help the project manager, without needing scheduling software, to access, understand, QC, and analyze schedule information. Our Portfolios allow you to create or assign baselines, run comparison between all updates, and view schedule and cost analytics, cash flows, and trends, all in one convenient place, or download to Excel for additional analysis. See an example of the analytics interface below.
Cost Management
One of the most exciting aspects of our project dashboards is the cost management tool, which allows you to choose to use cost data from your CPM schedules, sync with PROCORE, or manually input at a summary or detailed level. The cost information is dynamic, instantly fitting your needs. On-demand cost information is always available for team members and management in the cash flow and earned value analytics, and rolled up to your Project and Portfolio summaries.
Review and manage summary-level cost information (shown above) or get into the details of your cashflow, earned value, and trends (shown below).
Share with Anybody
We’ve made it easy to create, manage, and tailor your project dashboards and Portfolios. And, we’ve made it easy to share them safely with:
- Anyone in the World: with a public link, you can grant viewing rights to anyone. Add a password, and anyone can edit and re-organize.
- Anyone in your Organization: using IP filters, you can grant viewing and/or editing rights to anyone within your organization.
- Anyone on PC.o: sharing with other PC.o users provides the most possibilities; in addition to viewing and editing privileges, other users can add the projects or portfolios to their own workspace where they can edit, modify, and re-organize without affecting anyone else.
- Only a Select Few: control your data tightly by sharing a private link with a few, selected individuals whether or not they are in your organization or on PC.o.
The simplicity of the publishing options is shown below.
Video Tutorials
If you want to see how easy and powerful it is, check out our YouTube Playlist for step-by-step tutorials on how to get started on Project Portfolios with ProjectControls.online. And, as always, don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions. admin@projectcontrols.online.
