The Value of the Project Management Office
These days, there’s a myriad of tools available to the Project Management Office and Internal Service provider to record, analyze and recharge time and expenses. Naturally, they each offer varying levels of integration with other business systems and often sport a range of shiny new mobile and collaboration features.
But what value do these systems really bring to the business. In this free whitepaper we provide a strategic insight into how traditional time and expense systems provide limited benefit to the PMO in the long term, or at worst, can create an expensive and difficult-to-manage change management problem when you try to reverse into a different, more functional, product at a later stage.
In this whitepaper we explore how the Project Management Office needs to go beyond existing time and expense systems in order to drive long term business improvements and enable the PMO to take a far more strategic role in the management and deployment of resources.
Key takeaways include:
- Things to consider when choosing a time and expense solution
- How to simplify and streamline the way that that you schedule, manage and plan your resources and projects
- How to achieve better visibility and transparency across the organization
Building for the future is widely recognized as the best way to cut cost in IT. Future proofing systems, leveraging existing solutions and adding new modules is always easier and less costly than starting from scratch.
Driving exponential returns through strategic resource management
The time-honored way
There are a number of well-known sayings relating to the concept of time that are particularly relevant to running a successful organization today. For instance, when you need to get your skates on to win a new piece of business or get on a pitch list, time is often referred to as being of the essence. Unfortunately, time also has the annoying habit of waiting for no man. And, of course, should you make a mistake along the way, you can’t turn it back.
But perhaps the most relevant phrase of all is the one that goes ‘time is money’. Particularly if you’re in a service industry and everything you do is charged by the hour. But don’t worry - we’ve all been there, not done that, and missed the deadline. Many of us are so busy working to make money for our organization, we haven’t got the time to complete the paperwork to actually bill the client. And as everyone in business knows, if the work fl ow doesn’t run smoothly, neither does the cash fl ow.
Once upon a timesheet
Looking back at my first ever frontline consulting role, I clearly remember the hassle of recording time and expenses onto overly complex spreadsheets. These would often be cunningly designed by the fi nance department with the emphasis on making their job easier and yours just that little bit harder. I wouldn’t say I was drowning in paperwork but I did occasionally wear armbands just to stay afloat.
Of course, once you actually work out how to fi ll in these ludicrously extravagant forms, you then face the daunting task of coinciding your submissions with the client billing cycles. And that task isn’t made any easier when you consider that different project managers often favor slightly different layouts of spreadsheets, not to mention levels of granularity.
So it’s hardly surprising then that a resources available working time is only ever set at around 80% of the actual time they have available. Put simply, you need to reserve one day in five just to complete the paperwork.
