In addition to the project’s performance and status reporting that will be required by the project owner on capital construction projects, the JV Contractor needs to create their own performance dashboards for the executive directors and leaders of the entities that are part of the joint venture contract. Those executives need to have improved insight to make better and faster-informed decisions on the JV contracts.
Having a Project Management Information System (PMIS) like PMWeb to manage the hundreds of business processes as detailed in previous articles, those executives can be assured of having real-time trustworthy traceable data that can be reported on. This allows creating dashboards and reports that address the project’s performance from every possible project management aspect. For example, a dashboard can be created for the overall project performance, project financial performance, project buyout, project risks among others.
In addition, since PMWeb is a 100% web-enabled solution, executive directors and leadership of those entities will have access to those reports and dashboards, anywhere, anytime using any smart device. This is a must requirement for many joint venture contracts where usually it involves local and international contractors. This means that those executive directors and leadership will be stationed at different parts of the globe away from the JV contract is executed.
Many of those reports and dashboards will be created using the PMWeb Business Intelligence reporting tool. Those dashboards can be designed to allow the reader to drill down to the level of the specific business process that was the basis for the reported information. For example, from the financial progress card, the reader can drill down to the cost report where it details the project’s estimate, budget, income contract, and commitment contracts details including the original value, changes, revised value, pending changes, projected value, earned and actual cost to date. The cost report will be grouped by the cost breakdown structure (CBS) levels to enable the reader to drill down to more detailed CBS levels when needed. The same would apply to other project management aspects covered in the performance dashboard.
Although dashboards are the means for reporting the project performance status details, nevertheless for those executives need also to visualize the actual project’s performance. Site pictures are valuable nevertheless, having construction site time-lapse cameras enables those executives to view the actual project progress for the whole reporting period or a specific date. Most of the available site cameras available today provide the viewer with more details than just a video recording of what has happened. The camera IP address can be embedded in the dashboard to enable the executive to launch the link.
Since it is very common to see that JV Contractors tend to work together on more than one single project, then having a projects’ portfolio performance dashboard becomes a requirement. The dashboard will summarize the key performance indicators (KPIs) for each project and assign color indicators to highlight the performance status as being favorable, unfavorable, or acceptable. The projects can be grouped by type or location. The location for each project can be shown on a map as PMWeb allows capturing the geospatial coordinates for each project. The report would usually include a summary of the total income contracts value, earned value for work in place to date, change orders, and projected at completion income contracts value.
In addition to the dashboards created in the PMWeb BI reporting tool, the PMWeb data can be made accessible to interactive business intelligence and data visualization tools like MS Power BI. Those tools can be used to report on the data captured in PMWeb and other applications, such as the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications among many others. The ability of those tools to extract, transfer, load, associate, and blend data from different sources, provide executive directors and leaders of the joint venture contractor entities with unprecedented capabilities to dice, slice, and analyze this data to improve their insight on how the project is performing.
Projects’ portfolio performance dashboards can be also created to provide the needed insight on the overall projects performance. This will also help those executives to benchmark the JV contracts to identify projects that are not performing favorably. The layouts and formats of those reports are fully customizable and depend on the performance reporting requirements for each JV Contractor.
