No one can doubt that the last thing a project stakeholder, particularly those at the executive or leadership level, wants to have surprises that reflect a change to the project milestone dates, budget, or any other agreed on and approved project’s objectives. Surprises quickly erode confidence and create mistrust in the project management team capability to manage the work and keep critical stakeholders fully informed of the actual progress, issues, and needed actions.
Accurate and timely information is essential for the management of any project and in particular capital projects. Meaningful project reviews, progress monitoring, and performance evaluation cannot be carried out without having trust-worthy real-time information on the project. An accurate and complete project management information system (PMIS) like PMWeb must exist to provide the basis for how the project is doing. Project stakeholders and other project team members cannot have the insight to make better and faster-informed decisions without relevant and timely information.
What Information Is Needed to Manage a Capital Project?
The delivery of a capital project requires converting the idea that stakeholders had when the project investment was approved to deliver the products needed to achieve the project’s desired results. Many project management processes will be implemented during the project life cycle stages by the different entities, with conflicting interests and objectives involved in executing the project. Those could include the project owner, project management consultant, engineering consultants, contractors, subcontractors, and suppliers. Performing those processes will generate the information needed to monitor, evaluate and report the project’s performance.
Capturing the Project Information Data
The different entities involved in delivering the project would need to have a project management information system (PMIS) like PMWeb to capture the data from the various project management processes that must be performed. PMWeb comes ready with most of the input forms needed to deliver a capital project and custom form builder to create any additional input forms required to capture the necessary data to provide the required information. All supportive documents will be attached for each input-form, and links to other forms and imported MS Outlook emails will be created. This will ensure the quality and credibility of the captured data. To ensure the captured data’s accountability, each form will have a workflow to assign the steps for submitting, reviewing, and approving the captured data. Workflows will include branching conditions to enforce the project’s approval authority levels. Output forms can be designed in any desired form and format to ensure each project’s formal communication process information. Those forms can be digitally signed or printed to be wet-signed and stamped, then scanned and uploaded.
Sharing the Project Information
The data captured in each project management process will become the trust-worthy, real-time, and single-source data for sharing the project information. This information can be shared in different form and format depending on the recipient of the information.
Some stakeholders might be interested in detailed information that is specific to certain project management processes. Examples include risk register, budget, budget adjustments, schedule, change orders, awarded contracts, and many other issues. While other stakeholders might be interested in information that specific project function, for example, project financial status and project quality status. More senior stakeholders might be interested in information that provides an overall status of the project, program, or portfolio of projects performance.
