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Enterprise project management

Schools and universities are under considerable pressure to manage projects to successful completion—both on time and within budget. This requires solid planning, deft execution, ongoing resource management, and regular progress tracking. The odds of success improve significantly when decision-makers are able to track project costs and status in real time and to share vital information with all departments and individuals involved.

Through powerful tools for scheduling, tracking, and updating projects, the Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution can help you optimize resources, minimize costs, manage scope, and deliver on time. Using this solution, you can manage projects—from building new facilities to implementing new learning standards or upgrading IT systems—to maximize value and to help ensure that administrators, school boards, contractors, faculty, and other stakeholders receive clear and accurate progress reports on a regular basis.

Familiar tools keep project details under control.    If your school district has a significant large-scale task to accomplish, such as adopting a new math curriculum to meet state and district learning standards in the elementary grades, you’ll likely put together a review team that represents educators from various grade levels, district administrators, and parent representatives. This important project requires that you establish the criteria for reviewing the curriculum offerings from different vendors, make sure everyone has an opportunity to review the offerings for their grade level or area of expertise, compile their feedback, facilitate discussions, and ultimately, make a decision. While doing all of that, you may need to coordinate stipend payments or class coverage for teachers who work on the project.

The Microsoft EPM Solution puts templates and familiar tools in your hands to help you efficiently and effectively manage every detail of projects like this.

Key benefits

The Microsoft EPM Solution can help you:

• Efficiently plan and execute projects. Track your project’s budget, identify specific owners for each task, manage multiple sub-projects as a single object, and more—from simple projects to large programs.
• Manage resources more effectively. Effectively allocate and assign different types of resources to tasks in your project, including money, individuals, teams, facilities, and equipment.
• Gain visibility and insight. Easily find, analyze, and report on all types of information about your projects and share it in different formats (such as charts, diagrams, or graphs) for different audiences. In the final project phase, the Microsoft EPM solution provides advanced reporting and analysis of the capital project portfolio using Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007.
• Communicate and collaborate with ease. Use automated notifications, integration with other programs, and Web portal access, which enables users to easily view, update, and analyze project information. The integration of Office Project Server 2007 with Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 allows you to centrally store, link, and share project-related issues, risks, and documents for collaborative tracking.

Customer success case studies

Since implementing the Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management Solution, the IT staff at the University of Mississippi makes better strategic decisions and completes more projects, in addition to boosting staff productivity by 40 percent.