One of the essential requirements in delivering capital projects is enforcing accountability in reviewing and approving the everyday project management processes that could involve different individuals representing the various entities that are part of the project. Those are the hundreds of functions that relate to project communications, schedule, cost, contracts, quality assurance, and quality control, health and safety, risks and issues, among others.
Project owners are usually the entity that will be impacted most when the review and approval accountability is not enforced. This is true due to the mere fact that the project owner is the only entity that will have contractual agreements with the other entities involved in delivering the project, including project management consultants, engineering consultants, contractors, and suppliers. Therefore, when any of those entities cause harm to another entity when approvals and actions are delayed, the project owner will become the entity liable for those actions.
Therefore, the project owner should always demand having access to a single real-time version of the truth report that details every review and approval task’s status regardless of who needs to perform this task and to which project management process it belongs to. The out-of-the-box Workflow Inbox report generated by PMWeb Project Management Information System (PMIS) is an example of such reports. Coloring delayed tasks can further improve this report in red, scheduled tasks in cyan, and yet to be owing tasks in green. The report can also be modified to include more data fields.
This report will be automatically generated from the workflow tasks status captured in the relevant project management process. The workflow tab for each process details the level of workflow steps, including the actual date and time of when each workflow step was completed, by who, role, date due, action, comments, among others. This information will be automatically updated when its designated project team member performs a workflow task.
The workflow for each process will be created in the PMWeb Workflow module, where the workflow steps, duration of each stage, actions available for each step, and sequence for performing the steps are established. The workflow could also include approval authority levels, which are usually associated with processes that have financial data. Also, conditions can be added to determine who should be involved in reviewing the process depending on the process category values. For example, if the Request for Information (RFI) category is mechanical, then it needs to be reviewed by the mechanical engineer, whereas if the category was electrical, then it will be reviewed by the electrical engineer.
