Are you spending too much of time asking for project status or providing it? Check this out…
August 10th, 2007I am a frequent visitor of Mr.Rajesh Shakya’s blog www.rajeshshakya.com. When he asked me about QualBridge Enterprise Project Manager, I thought of writing this post. I have not yet explained the power of QualBridge EPM in my blog yet. I have taken a real project management scenario and went over it.
The inspiration to develop this product sparked, when we thought about what the project managers do most of the time.
Let’s consider a simple hierarchy in a small organization. Let’s say we have a VP, having 3 directors reporting to him, with each director having 3 managers, each handling 3 projects. Now each director has to handle 9 projects in total, and the VP is worried about 27 projects.
What does it take for the VP to know where his entire team is heading to? How does he know if his projects are on schedule, if not how much does it lag behind and etc.? He has to constantly have meetings with his directors and ask for status. How does the director get the status? He should call his managers? How does the manager gets the status? His leads and the actual people who work on the tasks should provide him the status.
The status actually flows from the task owners up all the level to VP. This is the normal project status life cycle in a simple organization with very little hierarchy. With 27 projects, think about the number of Microsoft Project reports VP has to handle every week, and think about the time the directors and the managers have to invest preparing these reports. And what does the actual task owners (developers, testers and etc) do most of the time? Provide task status, right?
What if we provide you a simple solution, where you don’t have waste all these time, and where you will be provided with a realtime project status and more useful information?
That’s what QualBridge Enterprise Project Manager does. Even though our target customers are SMEs, we have named it Enterprise Project Manager, because EPM could handle Enterprise level users and projects size with ease.
If you look at the example again, you can see that actual project status input comes from the task owners. So we have made the task owners as the actual drivers of the Project. Every team member have access to his(her) assigned tasks and can update anytime.
Lets say, the VP has asked his teams to update their status at the end of every working day. As the team members update their status, it flows through the entire hierarchy. Anyone in the hierarchy could easily and clearly see the real project status without spending too much of time.
Project Manager can view the status and performance of his entire team and drill to Project level. Directors can view the same of his entire team, and can drill to teams reporting to him and drill to individual projects. Now VP can look at his team status & performance, which team is lagging behind, which project is in danger zone, how much extra time would be needed to catch up the work, what is the efficiency of the entire team, team members, projects and etc.
All this feature is just a portion of QualBridge EPM features. It also has Defect Management, Document Management, User timeoff Management. We will be providing Timesheet Management feature very soon, as it will make it a complete Project Management solution.
If you are impressed, give yourself a try with the demo.
