For project-centric organizations, there is always an ongoing demand for new project ideas, known as initiatives, to achieve the organization’s strategic objectives. Different business units request those initiatives to identify what investments they need to achieve the strategic initiatives to be undertaken by the organization. Those requested initiatives, if approved, would become projects that could be selected to be delivered by the organization depending on the organization’s selection and prioritization process.
Using a Project Management Information System (PMIS) like PMWeb, organizations can formalize and improve the process of capturing initiative requirements, regardless of the initiative type. The PMWeb Work Requests module captures new initiatives, new projects, as well as new work requests for asset management. The user can provide high-level details of the requested initiative such as initiative description and scope of work, category and type, location, and the requester details. In addition, user-defined fields can be created to capture additional details such as estimated investment cost, planned start, and need by date among others. Those user-defined fields are important to better describe the initiative request. PMWeb allows the creation of different user-defined fields for which each group includes the user-defined fields relevant to that group. The value types for those user-defined fields could be text, date, numeric, currency, predefined lists, and Boolean.
The attachment tab will be used to attach all supportive documents for the requested initiative such as pictures, market demand studies, and drawings among others. Those documents will be usually uploaded and stored in PMWeb document management repository before they are attached to the new initiative request.
The workflow assigned to the initial request will be used to formalize the review and approval process for the initial request to be approved as an initiative which will be subject to further analysis to better define the scope of the requested initiative. It is important that the status of the initiative becomes approved before an initiative is generated.
When the initial request is approved, the initiative can be generated. Usually, the approval of the initial request will be done by the business unit head that has submitted the initial request. When selecting the generate command, PMWeb will provide a list of project templates that has many of the needed items for each project depending on its type predefined. This will help not only in expediting the process of generating the new initiative but also have common values readily available.
When this is completed, a new initiative will be created in PMWeb. This initiative form will be used to capture additional initiative details such as the cost estimate, master schedule, and response to initiative scoring details among other details to better assess the initiative and decide whether it can become a project. It should be noted that even if the initiative request becomes a project, it is by no means that the project will be approved for execution. The project still needs to be subject to the organization’s project selection and prioritization process.
The initiatives request report will provide the organization with a comprehensive real-time register of all initiative requests submitted by the different business units. The report will detail the status of those requests as well as the details of the initiative requests. The report will also include visuals to group requested initiatives by location, category, type, and status.
