ProjectDash™ monitors the key elements of any project
Deliverables, Resources and Milestones
- The ability to track and report on project deliverables, milestones and resources for ALL your projects in a consistent manner.
- The ability to track and report on risk associated with ALL your projects.
- Action item tracking with automatic notification for status changes and due dates for ALL your projects.
- Easily expand project communication and access to customers, colleagues or suppliers with varying degrees of accessibility.
- Quickly communicate to stake holders without burying them in detail
- Able to upload milestones and resources directly from MS Project and other data sources and avoid double entry of project data.
- For less detailed project management, ProjectDash is all you need.
- Project Teams and customers can see the progress and next steps - immediate and real time
- Highlight and track risks and issues
- Executives can track multiple projects and quickly identify problem areas
- Internal and External Customers and Partners can see the status of key projects
- Automatic e-mail notifications are generated and sent to key individuals if and when milestone due dates are completed, changed, or missed.
- ProjectDash lets you archive meeting minutes, project plans, or details of resource spending.
- All project team members have easy access to these key documents throughout the project's life.
Project Summary
The Project Summary view displays all of your active projects in an easy to understand table format so executives and portfolio managers can quickly identify problem projects and take corrective action. The project summary list can be sorted by each column and any project can "drilled down" into to view project details. For example in support of exception management practices, problem projects can be sorted to the top, identified and dealt with accordingly. Additionally projects can be sorted by project manager to support regular operations or project review meetings.
Deliverables
Why are you doing the project? What do the customers of the project
expect? ProjectDash™ allows you to track the desired business results
associated with the project. This can represent the quality of the project
process and output for construction or engineering projects that may have
a discrete deliverable (e.g. build a house according to this architectural
spec) or can represent some other measurable benefit for undertaking the
project (e.g. reduce lead time for fielding customer service calls). ProjectDash™
requires you at the start of the project to define deliverables in quantifiable,
1-5 scale terms. Expectations are clearly set, and you know what customers
think "exceeding" expectations would look like. Then throughout
the project and at completion, customers would evaluate the project based
on these deliverables. 
Deliverables are weighted as well so that the focus is on what is most
important to the project. For a sales force automation project, this may
look like:
Deliverable: Reduce sales force administrative time from 30% to 15%
-
1 - Does not meet expectation - still 30% administrative time
2 - Meets some expectations - 22.5% administrative time
3 - Meets expectations - 15% administrative time
4 - Better than expectation - 12.5% administrative time
5 - Far exceeds expectation - 10% administrative time
Resources
What investment do you have to make to complete the project? How many dollars or hours are required? ProjectDash™ supports a discipline of constantly updating the resource forecast throughout the project, ensuring good communication on this important project element.
A high level graphic appears on the Primary Project Dashboard showing the latest forecast, Plan and spending to-date. Click on this element and drilldown to Major Resource categories (i.e. Labor, Outside Services, T&E) to see where the variance is generated, in both graphical and data formats.
From this drilldown you can: 1) drilldown one level further into Minor resource categories (i.e. within Labor you may have Salaried, Hourly, temporary), 2) review all previous forecasts for this project, or 3) input a new forecast, if you have permissions.
Milestones
What are the key steps and dates to completing the project? How long will the project take? ProjectDash™ supports constantly updating the milestone forecast throughout the project life. If milestone dates change, not only does the Primary Dash clearly show the change, but e-mails are sent to the distribution list members that night. E-mails are also sent on milestone completion and any milestone dates that have passed but not marked as complete.
Milestones are shown graphically with key project phases on the Y axis
and dates/time on the X axis. You can see at a glance where you may be
behind. Clicking on the element leads you to the dates and days in between
Major Milestones. From there, like Resources, you can 1) drilldown one
level further into Minor milestone categories, 2) review all previous
forecasts for this project, or 3) input a new forecast, if you have permissions.
Risks and Issues
The Primary Dashboard for a project highlights key risks and issues with
the project. Risks can be assessed both on probability and impact with a
resulting aggregate score. Review how Risks look on the Primary dashboard. Action Plans
Key Actions are also tracked on the Primary Dashboard, keeping focus on
actions underway to manage risks or drive Project objectives further. E-mail
reminders are sent to Action owners and notices sent to the distribution
list when Actions are completed, or due dates changed or missed. Review
how Actions look on the Primary dashboard.Key Links
Key links are available to store critical project plans, worksheets or documents. A total of 1 Mb is available for each project. Review how Links look on the Primary dashboard.
- Store detailed Project Plans.
- Keep detailed spreadsheets on costs available to team.
- Project minutes can be kept online, not in everyones'paper file.