One of the key challenges in delivering capital projects’ portfolio is the uniqueness that each project could have. Within the same organization, a capital project could be unique from other capital projects in terms of its scope of work, budget, milestone dates, parties involved and their obligations and entitlements, procurement strategy, risks, issues, market conditions, location among many others. This uniqueness means that decisions that need to be made during the delivery of those projects are, to a certain extent, unique and depends on the completeness, quality, trustworthy and speed of information available when the decision was made.
Therefore, ensuring that decision makers have access to complete, quality, trustworthy and quick information is not an option if they need to have faster insights to make better informed decisions on their capital projects’ portfolio. Unlike Information Technology or other type of non-capital projects, the information that decision makers need to have access to far exceeds schedule, resources, budget, deliverables, risks and issues that are usually updated on a weekly and sometimes on monthly basis by few project team members. The information captured is massive and includes information that relates to pre- and post-contract management, site administration, quality assurance and control, health and safety, environment, claims and disputes among many others. This information will be provided by the different entities who have been contracted by the project owner to deliver the different components of the project scope of work.
In addition, individuals from the different entities who are responsible for providing the information could be located at different projects’ locations, within the same country as well as other countries, or the organizations’ premise. Performing work from distant locations has also become an increased requirement because of the COVID-19 pandemic, for which it will continue to be an acceptable business practice. Further, this information should follow strict rules when it comes to submitting, reviewing and approving before decision makers can use it.
To address the challenge to have complete, quality, trustworthy and quick information on capital projects’ delivery, organizations need to have an enterprise-wide Project Management Information System (PMIS) like PMWeb to capture all needed information. This will eliminate the need for the time-consuming and lengthy processes to extract, load, transfer, verify, validate and integrate the captured projects’ information which is usually stored at different projects’ locations among others. For many, the elimination of this process is considered as a lean management practice as it eliminates the wasted time and effort
PMWeb provides the different entities and their projects’ assigned individuals with a web-enabled secured access to allow them to provide the needed information anytime, anywhere using any device. PMWeb is flexible enough to allow creating all needed processes including the required input form to capture the information, workflow to establish the sequence for providing the information and supportive document files for the provided information. In addition, PMWeb is available as an on-premise hosted solution, in addition to SaaS subscription model, to address data security and protection requirements for project owners.
This captured information will become the basis for providing a single version of the truth for each project’s performance to provide a faster insight to enable project stakeholders to make better informed decisions. The same captured information will also be the basis for projects’ portfolio and program dashboards as well as any other report that could be needed by the stakeholders to provide the needed real-time insight.
