Managing projects, regardless of size, is a difficult and challenging endeavor. Providing project status, cost and schedule forecasts, risks or opportunities, and workflow management, to name a few, are all critical pieces to successful project management. Making these tasks more complicated are the tools and systems used because they rarely speak to each other. This often requires manual integration of the data to truly understand the status of the project.
Here are five things that will help you improve your project controls and management disciplines using Deltek’s Project & Portfolio Management (PPM) suite of tools.
1. Open Plan is an enterprise-class project management solution that offers the power and flexibility to complete projects of all types and sizes on time and within budget. It does this by improving your scheduling discipline. Open Plan warns you that entered data does not comply with industry best practices, company policy, or requirements from federal agencies like the DCMA, thereby adding an additional level of control and maturity to your organization. It is also great for resource management across your organization.
2. Acumen is essential for project analysis and ensuring your schedules are achievable, sound and realistic. Acumen helps organizations account for, and proactively reduce, exposure to risk and uncertainty. Yet most people are unaware of Acumen’s ability to accelerate schedules. Acumen helps planners identify the minimum number of changes needed to meet a goal and see where acceleration is possible, run what-if analysis and show defendable results.
3. For projects that have earned value management (EVM) requirements, Deltek Cobra is the industry leader for government contracting firms. Cobra integrates with the leading scheduling tools and meets all of the EVM standards required by the US government. It quickly produces accurate reports so you can spend more time conducting analysis and taking corrective action. That is why many customers have implemented Cobra not only on their large EVM projects, but also on the small and medium projects. This gives them an enterprise view of the entire business.
4. Remember the days of looking through an inch thick paper cost report and another schedule report to see where you had project issues? Then, writing queries to look for project variances such as CPI, SPI or TCPI? This was a manual ‘pull’ method. Deltek PM Compass gives you a centralized view of project information, also known as the Command Center. A view of portfolio, program and project status – all in your personalized dashboard. PM Compass ‘pushes’ project alerts, status, risks, accounting and financial data. The days of feeling like a software coder writing queries to see project trends and variances are no more.
5. Managing the many subcontractor, vendor and internal schedules across your organization is a time consuming, labor-intensive and costly process. Touchstone fully automates the schedule submission process, adhering to your company’s schedule quality criteria, best practices and standards. Instead of reviewing every schedule for quality and deliverability, Touchstone takes that burden off your shoulders. This allows you to spend valuable time managing and analyzing your projects and programs instead of squandering resources validating every schedule submittal.
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