Gaining Visibility and Control Over Your Large Projects

Deltek’s Project & Portfolio Management (PPM) clients manage some of the largest, most complex projects in the world.  Producing breakthrough technology, these projects often take years to complete and contain hundreds of thousands of individual activities needing to be tracked and reported on.  Even as these contracts were growing and breaking records, their size and complexity, and rate of change required higher levels of automation to improve visibility and control.

Today we commonly see organizations using a variety of tools to capture the details of proposed changes, route them for review, and get the source systems updated.  This is often a very manual and cumbersome process, relying on individuals to each do their part without the benefits of timely information and automated processes.  Issues such as rekeying errors and stale data introduce problems which cause churn and slow everything down. When facing an audit, the effort involved in pulling together all the required information is incredible, and if an error is found immediately the entire data set is questioned.

Leveraging Integrated Project Management Tools for Large-scale Projects

Clients have been successful using Deltek’s  Integrated Project and Portfolio Management solutions, such as Cobra, Open Plan, and PM Compass, to manage and deliver large-scale projects and programs.

Related articles:

• A Complete Guide to Project Portfolio Management

Deltek is excited to introduce a new PM Compass feature called the Integrated BCR (IBCR), a transformative solution to managing change.  This new workflow solution carefully considers the integrated relationship between costs in Cobra and the schedule in Open Plan, allowing users to not only send and receive data between the systems, but actually call native application functionality through the PM Compass interface. This allows PM Compass to pull users through and end to end process but does not require them to access three separate and independent systems.

With PM Compass interacting directly with Cobra and Open Plan, it manages requests to modify scope, budget and/or schedule information.  This new capability allows users to:

• Drive the monthly cadence for accomplishing required tasks, not just for change control but progress achieved, variances to plan, risk mitigation and more
• Model proposed changes independently or as a group to make sure that anything proposed will gain approval and not negatively affect other portions of the plan
• Monitor the entire process and retain an audit record suitable to trace work from initial authorization to completion
• Produce a BCR Summary report which clearly shows the before, approved change, and after positions for all change requests, and highlights when anything gets completed incorrectly

In summary, we’re excited about the IBCR bringing a true “What If’ capability to assess changes across any number of change requests, across multiple projects, all in a non-destructive sandbox environment.  We’re sure you’ll quickly see its capacity to drive efficiency and confidence into your change management process.  For more information or to see this new feature, reach out to your PPM sales person or contact us today to schedule a deeper dive.

The IBCR feature will be introduced to PM Compass in early 2022, making the capability available to clients using Cobra and Open Plan.  In case clients would like to prepare for the release, PM Compass 8.2 will require Oracle 19c, plus a minimum of Open Plan 8.5 CU7 and Cobra 8.4 CU5.