Top 10 Tips for Justifying an EPM Tool

Top 10 Tips for Justifying an EPM Tool

Tip 1: Alignment with strategic objectives. Reaching long-term business goals often requires investing in the right business activities now. With an Enterprise Project Management (EPM) tool, you can identify, prioritize, and select projects that best support your strategic objectives as well as align your resources accordingly. And, by routinely evaluating and adjusting the project portfolio, you can ensure continuous alignment with your business objectives.

Tip 2: Faster, more informed business decisions. An EPM solution can provide visibility into your project portfolio for monitoring performance, visualizing trends, and identifying business gaps. With these capabilities, you can make informed decisions on how to proceed with existing projects, make tradeoffs, and pursue new opportunities. Making accurate decisions quickly can be of tremendous business value and is a key consideration in justifying an EPM tool for the organization.

Tip 3: Continuous process improvement. Project organizations are increasingly standardizing their processes to improve operational efficiencies, increase cross functional teamwork, and more effectively manage projects of different types and sizes. With an EPM solution, you can implement a common framework for project portfolio management guided by proven best practices, resulting in better management and control of projects as well as identification and implementation of process improvement opportunities.

Tip 4: Increased customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction often is more than finishing projects on time, within budget, and within scope. The delivery process must also engage the customer, involve the customer, and meet the customer's expectations. An EPM solution enables you to ensure a high level of integrity to the project delivery process. The end results are project plans that reflect realistic schedules, resource requirements, and budgets. Hence, so you can set, communicate, and meet achievable milestones for more consistent project delivery and higher levels of customer satisfaction.

Tip 5: Better collaboration and coordination. As businesses become more complex and geographically diverse, structured communication is vital to ensure teams share common goals and work together effectively. An EPM solution provides access to timely business-critical project information, so teams can share knowledge, better collaborate to complete tasks, and communicate progress effectively to manage risks and accommodate project changes.

Tip 6: Empowered project teams. Project team members make high-impact decisions as part of their daily routines. Businesses are increasingly relying upon project managers and are seeking ways to equip them with the tools they need to perform even better. With an EPM Solution, project managers, project team members, and the leadership team can access the latest project information resulting in more efficient time management, better communication and decision making, and increased accountability.

Tip 7: Effective resource deployment. Many organizations struggle to deploy resources effectively. This can lead to higher costs, project delays, and missed opportunities. An EPM Solution can help you more accurately assess resource commitments, deployment alternatives, and to deploy resources effectively across your organization. The end results is having the right people on the right projects at the right time for optimized delivery.

Tip 8: Ability to strategically hire. Without understanding long-term workloads and resource capacity, companies can experience hiring-firing cycles. Such cycles are inefficient and often result in higher overhead, lost knowledge, and very poor employee morale. By providing visibility into the overall work commitments and resourcing capabilities, an EPM solution helps a company achieve a balance of strategic recruiting, outside contracting, and potentially outsourcing to achieve the long-term business objectives of the company

Tip 9: Fully leveraging existing technologies. An EPM solution fully leverages the existing technologies that most organizations already have in place, such as your enabling technologies, database, collaboration platforms, and desktop tools. Hence, you can get the most out of your existing investments in infrastructure, applications, and user skills, rather than incurring a duplication of investment and redundancy in capabilities. By customizing and integrating an EPM solution with your line-of-business systems, you can get a comprehensive view of your organization's activities for better management and control.