Key problem/s

Due to ASC’s current technology maturity across the P3M space, Project Managers, PMO Officers and Finance Analysts spend excessive time hopping between project, comms, collaboration and other office tools, manually updating, quality assuring, and capturing project related records and servicing activities. This presents productivity, efficiency and information quality issues. Additionally, a lack of visibility of easily accessible real-time information concerning project status, resource consumption and risks ensures that monitoring, tracking and responsiveness to portfolio and project challenges are impeded.

As a result, optimisation of resources across the portfolio, timely alerting of project difficulties, more effective risk management, and real-time project reporting are all unattainable, despite the best efforts of ASC staff.

ASC needs to standardise Portfolio, Program and Project Management technology capability through implementing a flexible, automated, fully integrated P3M platform, that easily integrates with other business collaboration and comms tool, as well as ERP systems. This will reduce the excessive effort currently involved in project update, reporting, monitoring and tracking, while also strengthening risk management, enabling resource optimisation, providing improved alerting, enabling improved stakeholder engagement and raising overall portfolio, program and project transparency and visibility. Consequently. Project execution productivity will improve, and evidenced-based decision-making across the portfolio will be uplifted. 

The users and their needs

The P3M solution will be used by the following user groups, as follows:

Executive (Executive Committee, EGMs, Sponsors, Advisors)

• Approve projects, plans and funding.
• Monitor/Track projects via reports/dashboards presenting high-level project information.

PPM (PMO, Tech Group Portfolio Management, Capital Works Portfolio Management and Analysts)

• Create project records, review and edit project information.
• Develop reports.
• Monitor/Track project performance, resource consumption, budget usage

Project Managers / Project Team Members (includes external users)

• Create, read and update project planning and execution information.

The variety of projects undertaken by ASC varies significantly across the organisation from small simple marketing campaign management, through challenging IT initiatives, to large complex capital works projects involving major sub-contractors. Project methodologies include agile, waterfall and hybrid. This means that configurability and flexibility are key user needs, along with automated, seamless integration within the P3M tool and with other ASC business systems, and real-time visibility of projects, programs and portfolios. 

Work already done

An initial market scan was recently completed which provided ASC with valuable information concerning products available more specifically for PMO needs. Based upon the information yielded by the market scan, a re-examination of wider needs, and a re-focused determination to align more specifically with strategic plans, requirements were expanded to encompass P3M at all levels.