19 Oct Drive Adoption with Project Online… It isn’t just a “management tool”
User adoption is the key to rolling out any enterprise software solution. However, it can be one of the biggest obstacles your organization will face. So, how can you manage this risk?
Answer this question…
And not just for management, but Everyone.
There is a HUGE benefit to Project Managers, Resource Managers and Team Members by implementing a project management system. But many teams don’t realize it. There is a win/win scenario by educating your team on the value for them AND ensuring management uses the data to drive improvements.
By having an enterprise system, management has visibility to catch underperforming projects and then work with teams to address issues. For example, at the portfolio level in Project Online, management can gain insight into key KPI’s to understand project health.
In the Project Online portfolio screenshot below, you can see two projects that are in trouble with yellow Overall Health indicators: Ecommerce Portal Development and VOIP Phones
Project Online Project Center
Now, lets figure out “the why” by drilling into the details to identify & address the root cause of the project performance issue. Hmmmm, Daniel is managing both of these projects. Could it be that he has been allocated to way too many projects?
By connecting Project Online data to Power BI with OneConnect, management can easily ask how many projects Daniel is managing (without ever even logging into Project Online). Power BI lets you ask questions in natural language and get the right charts and graphs as your answer. (I could have also captured this information right in the Project Center view as well, but I wanted to share this cool feature with you.)
Wow – Daniel has 29 active projects. That seems like a lot of projects for Daniel to juggle. With this insight, management can help Daniel by reallocating or canceling some of the projects.
Another reason for poor project performance could be that the team members can’t dedicate enough time to these projects. With Project Online, you can view what resources are working on across multiple projects. Over allocated resources not only hurt project performance, but can also impact the overarching climate of your culture and cause retention issues.
Below, you can see that our availability is actually in the negative indicating we have some over allocations to address.
Or, maybe the estimating process needs to be revisited & analyzed to see if there are historical trends of under-estimating the effort for that project type…. With Project Online, you can associate enterprise project types and capture project performance over time, by type of project.
I could go on with many more examples, but the point is, without all of this data centralized, management wouldn’t have access to the information that will help teams be successful. When used this way, it’s not just a “management tool”. It’s a tool for everyone engaged in projects to improve performance & morale! Don’t be afraid of the Red indicator!! Management can’t help if they don’t know anything is wrong!
When implementing an enterprise system, be sure to educate teams on the value to them – not just to the bottom line. In addition, be sure that management leverages the insight they gain to help your employees improve their performance. They will be happier and more productive contributing to the success of the organization and the ROI of your investment will be much greater.
