Access to accurate and timely information is everything
Having access to the right information at the right time could be the difference between success and failure for a business. With the vast quantities of data now available, the key is obtaining the ‘right’ information and displaying it in a simple and easy-to-view manner so that decision makers have the necessary information to make an informed choice about the next move for their business.
Traditionally the Project Management Office, PMO, has fulfilled the role of collating information about the progress with programmes and projects, but it has often been displayed in a haphazard and uncoordinated fashion with different programmes reporting in competing formats. The PMO has also had the twin difficulty of facing off to management who require information immediately, whilst having data sources providing data once a month. For it to be useful, the data needs to be combined succinctly in an orderly manner so that senior management can not only access it easily, but also be confident about using it to make important business decisions.
Cost and time overruns are commonplace
Projects overrunning, costs spiralling out of control and management being left in the dark about progress, or lack of it, is nothing new. According to a report in Forbes magazine[1], The Channel Tunnel is reported to have come in $21.1bn over budget, Wembley Stadium $776m over and the Millennium Dome $895m. Only last month, a review of progress on HS2[2], the high-speed railway linking London and the north of England, showed the cost overrun to be in the region of £30bn, casting doubt on whether it will actually be finished.
How can this be allowed to happen?
These instances raise the question as to whether the cost overruns would have been allowed to happen if management had access to the right information at the right time. As an outsider, it is difficult to comprehend these levels of overspend and begs the question as to why the issues weren’t flagged before the losses were so big. We at Brickendon believe the key to delivering a project successfully, on time and on budget, is transparency. Armed with the right information at the right time, management are able to make informed decisions to try and avoid such excessive overruns in either time or cost.
Real-time management information directly to your dashboard
Our Executive Programme Dashboard provides real-time management information directly to your desktop or tablet. It allows business leaders to effectively manage change within their organisation across the areas of execution, cost and resources. More specifically, it enables the effective reporting and management of the three constraints governing all change programmes: scope, costs and time/schedule.
It also highlights the areas of concern and enables management to focus on those projects and issues without needing to wade through a long detailed report, as well as enabling easy comparisons between the status, budget and resources of particular projects and portfolios.
Our Executive Programme Dashboard facilitates:
- complete transparency for management at a global, programme, workstream, project or phase level,
- accurate instant reporting of milestones, risks and issues at a global, programme, workstream, project or phase level, and
- detailed financial and resource analysis and reporting of forecast versus actual results at all levels.
By keeping on top of the progress with accurate data, management teams are able to make better decisions about allocation of resources. This is particularly important for large-scale change projects covering significant budgets or spanning global locations within financial organisations. The dashboard provides a one-page overview showing which projects are on track and on budget and which are behind and over budget.