Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution Overview
Generating Business Value Through Strategic Alignment
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The Microsoft® Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution is ideal for organisations that need strong coordination and standardisation between projects and project managers, centralised resource management or higher-level reporting about projects and resources.
Introduction
In a competitive business climate, your organisation's ability to efficiently align resources and business activities with strategic objectives can mean the difference between succeeding and just surviving. To achieve strategic alignment organisations are increasingly managing their activities and processes as projects - in essence, projectising their business - to monitor performance more closely and make better business decisions about their overall work portfolio. By planning and tracking projects with clarity and precision organisations can respond with greater agility to the demands of a fast-changing business environment.
Strategic alignment for enterprise project management
Making your strategic goals a reality requires technology that is robust enough to support your core business and yet flexible enough to accommodate your existing processes. The Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution provides this infrastructure, so your organisation can gain visibility and insight, and control its portfolio of projects, as well as improve productivity, reduce cycle times, decrease costs and increase quality.
Manage Projects as a Collective Portfolio for Better Decision-Making
More effectively manage your company's project portfolio by continually identifying, prioritising and investing in projects that align with your corporate strategy. By doing so, you can make sure your company's efforts are spent only on activities that contribute to the bottom line.
The Microsoft Office EPM Solution can help you manage your project portfolio effectively by enabling you to:
| • | Fairly evaluate project status and quickly identify at-risk and underperforming projects using roll-up scorecard reports that graphically display key business metrics. |
| • | Integrate critical project data as web parts into your executive-level dashboard side-by-side with other critical information for a more complete view of your business. |
| • | Gain insight into the performance of your overall portfolio by identifying trends and problem areas using powerful analysis tools. |
| • | Understand the impact of trade-offs and evaluate strategies to mitigate risk using what-if scenario modelling features. |
Optimise Resources Across Your Organisation for Sustained Competence
People are the most valuable - and often the most expensive - assets of your organisation. To maximise productivity and be cost-effective, it is critical to assign the right people to the right project teams.
Managing people across an organisation, however, is complex. Resource information is often controlled in various departments, making it difficult to forecast short- and long-term resource needs accurately. Without a complete understanding of the skills and availability of its staff, your organisation cannot strategically hire, deploy and develop resources that match the needs of your project portfolio.
The Microsoft Office EPM Solution provides you with powerful resource management capabilities to assist you in achieving the greatest return on your investment in your employees.
| • | Better assess resource efficiency and activity across projects by accurately and consistently tracking resource use and workload. |
| • | Assemble high-performing project teams using staffing tools that help your organisation optimise resource allocation and assignments from a central resource pool. |
| • | Effectively determine hiring needs by forecasting short- and long-term resource capacity and project demands. |
Streamline Project Management Performance for Competitive Advantage
Whether delivering products or services, all organisations need to meet project deadlines, budgets and stakeholder expectations. To maintain customer satisfaction and meet customer expectations, no room exists for project errors or delays.
To stay competitive, companies are increasingly implementing initiatives to improve their project delivery by continually reducing cycle times, minimising costs and controlling quality. These initiatives require skilled people, standardised processes and superior technology - unified and driven by effective project management.
The Microsoft Office EPM Solution enables your organisation to streamline project management processes for greater performance:
| • | Achieve organisation-wide compliance and greater efficiencies in project delivery by capturing and deploying best practices and continually improving processes. |
| • | Consistently meet project goals and attain higher customer satisfaction by creating plans that reflect realistic schedules, resource requirements and budgets. |
| • | Gain a deeper level of project governance and control through project performance, issue and risk tracking capabilities. |
| • | Comply with government and regulatory requirements by integrating standardised methodologies with your existing project management processes. |
Strengthen Collaboration Across the Enterprise for Improved Productivity
Effective communication is essential to achieving project success. With clear communication processes, team members can share knowledge, work together smoothly to complete tasks and deliverables and respond quickly to change.
Project teams, however, are becoming more dispersed - both organisationally and geographically - threatening productivity and elevating the need for technology that can meaningfully connect team members to maintain coordination and quality.
The Microsoft Office EPM Solution provides an infrastructure that strengthens collaboration and accountability among all levels of the organisation.
| • | Empower managers and project teams to make timely, informed decisions by giving them web-based access to real-time business-critical project data. |
| • | Increase participation in the project management process by enabling team members to easily manage, track and report on their project activities through familiar tools, like the web and email. |
| • | Realise greater accountability through a central tracking system that enables project teams to record, assign and resolve issues. |
| • | Gain higher quality and efficiency by jointly developing and organising project-related deliverables using a central document repository with version and editing control. |
Drive Business Value
The Microsoft Office EPM Solution is built on a flexible platform that can be customised to support your existing processes and integrate with your line-of-business systems, so you can get the most out of your current technology investments. With the Microsoft Office EPM Solution, your entire organisation can work together to continually improve processes, increase efficiency and facilitate knowledge sharing, driving a sustainable return on your investment.
Learn more about the technologies that comprise the EPM Solution.
Next Steps
Microsoft has developed an extensive network of solution providers who can provide skilled professionals to tailor a solution to fit your business needs and get the most of your investment. To start building your own Microsoft Office EPM Solution, contact one of the many Project solution providers.