BI Tools + PM Teams

  Knowledge Management   Lessons Learned   ProjectsAtWork  

Virtualization trends and social technologies have greatly changed the way today’s teams collaborate, generating volumes of unstructured data and new challenges in tracking and measuring project performance. But the rapid changes have also created new opportunities in the area of business intelligence that can improve analysis and visibility.

When it comes to visibility and tracking, every project manager knows there are three key metrics that must be monitored and measured on any project; these metrics answer the questions, “Is the project delivered on time, on budget and on plan/to specification?” Many project teams seek the answers to these questions using traditional methods and tools — Microsoft Project for planning, combined with a plethora of spreadsheets to manage related reporting and financial management aspects of the project, backed by weekly status review meetings or conference calls for team-based information gathering. 

One of the ways project teams have changed over the last few decades is related to the sheer volume of projects under control. Leveraging a project/portfolio management framework, project management offices can now effectively manage an entire portfolio consisting of multiple projects running in parallel. This increases management complexity by an order of magnitude. Portfolios spanning a broad array of projects …

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