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Corporate Governance - Benefits

With corporate responsibility and the need for governance high in the public and medias eye there has been much discussion regarding how the management of the corporate recource and skills pool needs to reflect, accurately, contemporary business needs and to deliver the services required to support line of business activities including key projects. With this in mind business need to credibly provide evidence that their management of resources, business capability, programs and projects is inline with regulatory and corporate governance requirements.

Realise Corporate Governance

Over recent years there has been much discussion and writing regarding the techniques and processes needed to fulfil this information compliance and corporate governance need. Many large blue chip enterprises have planning and resourcing capabilities which tie in to year end reporting and financial systems helping measure past performance. The discussion is that this is not good enough, reporting 1-6months after a project end on its success or failure rarely satisfies the needs of investors or the board. The glaring hole in the current model is the lack of visibility into these problems at the coalface; project failure and success as well as business information linking projects, resources and capability should be seen from a lights on perspective not historic. Today's enterprise needs to understand project progress and business needs right now and tomorrow no 3 months ago, combining this with the ability to adapt the business as its demands change bring compliance and corporate governance to a level that is acceptable to the board and investors.

What is noted by many of these organisations is that the processes and tools that worked in manufacturing or engineering are not giving the same level of visibility in the IT or services departments. The lack of structure and longevity of projects (and people) make the project/portfolio/program management and process management tools that regularly cross over the department borders unsuitable in these more dynamic and flexible departments. The trend to move these enterprise planning systems into the entire enterprise is not surprising as the control, visibility and savings they bought to manufacturing, engineering etc were so great it can only be expected that best practice would promote their transition. Analysts and suppliers are now seeing that this round peg however re-branded or adapted will not fit in the square hole that is the entire enterprise, which is leaving very few alternatives for the rest of the business to improve and manage itself better under the current climate of pressure to analyse and improve.

Corporate Governance Compliance

Rather than follow the trend and try to use these tools some organisations are looking further a field for solutions that are built ground up with service based organisations needs in mind. Understanding the rapid changing environment, which in turn impacts on the underlying information, is the key to solutions such as Atlantic Global's Corporate Vision and Atlantic Global Business Solutions (Timesheet and Project Planning Software). These tools do away with the need to track every tiny aspect of a project, resource or business object, instead looking at the business level and above. Understanding the lowest common denominator that is important to making decisions and disregarding what is below this now gives business managers and decision makers a far more accurate and up-to-date view of their information and the business. Whereas in manufacturing the tasks in a project plan are vital to the success of a project and also their change in resource need, time or length is small, service based projects have rapidly changing requirements, resource needs, tasks and timescales due to the nature of the customer and the involvement of people rather than machines and process.

A change in the way a business manages its people and projects can come about from understanding and using these new tools and processes. Managers can now empower staff to do work on a project not to a rigid project plan but more flexibly involving interaction from the customer and other teams or resources in meeting a final unified goal/milestone, this also creates savings in the amount of time updating and measuring against these task based plans which can sometimes take over managers workloads if it could be done properly. Secondly the level of visibility higher up the organisation improves in terms of time to information and accuracy of information. Now rolling up project data such as resource allocation, milestones and financials allow decision makers to see where there are lulls in resource utilisation or spikes in project demands. These are just two of the improvements that can be found in looking differently at different departments in the business and giving them the right tools for the job.

Atlantic Global are not saying that Task based planning and Microsoft Projects days are numbered but they are brave enough to state that there is a time and a place for these tools and maybe one tool can't do every job. Rather than rebranding one tool for a new job (which entirely defeats the ideals of Corporate Governance, and therefore questions the legality of their implementation in an organisations) software and solution vendors have a responsibility to produce tools suited to the task and market them responsibly. This trend can be seen with the move of many Project Portfolio Management Vendors labelling their products as IT Governance rather than total Corporate Governance, this is due to the nature of the tools where structured and automated information recording is the key to success and use of the solutions. As mentioned above large amounts of information is difficult to manage and record when people are involved (on a day to day basis and in real time) but IT can record information and measure itself making it far more suitable to providing accurate low level data. Although these solutions can be successful in the IT department, businesses must not be fooled into thinking they will also work in departments relating to people and their associated projects.

With many organisations being forced to think differently about how they meet corporate governance requirements in different parts of the organisation Atlantic are fortunate to find that many are now listening to these ideas and with a number of strong case studies to back up this methodology we may see a new wave of Business management tools coming to light to support people and service based organisations or departments.