Key Elements of Magellan
Operate with Excellence: Enterprise Project Management (EPM), if it is done well, can give your organization an overwhelming competitive edge. The Standish Group has estimated that failed or mismanaged projects cost US firms 155 billion dollars annually. The companies that master the art and science of consistent project delivery have emerged as market leaders in a variety of verticals. But, you cannot master what you cannot control; and, you cannot control what you cannot see. Visibility is the key to developing the governance necessary to drive your organization toward the operational excellence, which creates a sustainable competitive advantage.
Develop Integrated Scorecards: Does your organization sustain a number of decision support systems? Do you sometimes have a challenge getting these various systems to paint a unified picture of what is going on in your project portfolio? Often times the investment in new systems leaves a delicate balance of power between the new system and other sources of truth. If your organization has more than one platform that meaningfully supports key project decisions, it may be time to look at integrating these platforms into one cohesive reporting matrix that can create the project intelligence necessary to drive your company forward.
Manage the Change: The successful deployment of an EPM platform requires more than configured technology and a few new procedures. It requires a sustained effort at change management. To get different results, holistic changes must be made with people, processes, and IT platforms in a coordinated and sustained manner. In order to gauge the effectiveness of your efforts, and to understand where additional investment may be necessary, you will need to have visibility! Visibility that can only be created by a robust, customized, and scalable EPM reporting matrix.
Cost
This program typically costs $25,000 to $50,000 depending on the complexity of the engagement and the total scope of deliverables. Variables that would affect complexity (cost) include: number and sophistication of reports, number of distinct business units and their geographic distribution, reporting formats, and the methods and modalities of distribution.
Duration
This program can be completed in as little as three weeks providing that all of the required equipment, software, and personnel are available when needed. The primary schedule constraint is availability of key Project Management and Business Unit Personnel.
Core Deliverables
Custom Web Views and Dashboards
Microsoft Project server offers a powerful and effective palette of views and dashboards to manage your portfolio of projects. This palette can only be utilized if your environment has been successfully configured to capture your key business drivers, strategic priorities, KPI, and CSFs. Need to know what’s on schedule and what’s not? Need to manage a high priority or high risk project? Need to track financial performance of a key program? Whatever your required use-case, the Project Server platform can be configured to give you the visibility you need to control your own destiny.
Portfolio Analysis and Modeling
Custom OLAP cubes and PDS extensions also energize a number of powerful tools for analyzing your portfolio and programs. Whether you are trying to manage consumption of key skills inventories, managing named resources across a strategic program, or tracking financial and resource constraints across a set of proposed projects, the portfolio analyzer can give you the visibility and control you need to produce the optimal result.
SQL Reporting Services
In addition to the customizable web views available in Microsoft’s Project Web Access, you may need more robust and individualized reports for specific groups. This is especially important for organizations that have deployed project server across multiple constituencies, yet still require a single backbone of reports. SQL reporting services is also effective for organizations that cannot rely exclusively on web-based reporting structures. SQL reporting allows you to leverage all the data at the project, resource, task, and assignment level to populate, filter, group and sub-divide custom reports in any conceivable fashion. These reports can be posted to a Windows SharePoint website and/or distributed periodically by E-mail to specific individual or groups. The result: powerful, individualized, secure, and timely project intelligence in the specific format of highest impact for the various consumer groups.