Strategic alignment for enterprise project management
The Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM)
The Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution is ideal for organizations that need strong coordination and standardization between projects and project managers, centralized resource management, or higher-level reporting about projects and resources.
In a competitive business climate, your organization'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, organizations are increasingly managing their activities and processes as projects—in essence, projectizing 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, organizations 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 organization can gain visibility, insight, and control its portfolio of projects, as well as improve productivity, reduce cycle times, decrease costs, and increase quality.
More effectively manage your company's project portfolio by continually identifying, prioritizing, 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 modeling features. |
People are the most valuable—and often the most expensive—assets of your organization. To maximize productivity and be cost-effective, it is critical to assign the right people to the right project teams.
Managing people across an organization, 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 organization 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 organization optimize resource allocation and assignments from a central resource pool. |
| • | Effectively determine hiring needs by forecasting short- and long-term resource capacity and project demands. |
Whether delivering products or services, all organizations 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, minimizing costs, and controlling quality. These initiatives require skilled people, standardized processes, and superior technology—unified and driven by effective project management.
The Microsoft Office EPM Solution enables your organization to streamline project management processes for greater performance:
| • | Achieve organization-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 standardized methodologies with your existing project management processes. |
Effective communication is essential to achieve 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 organizationally 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 organization.
| • | 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 e-mail. |
| • | Realize 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 organizing project-related deliverables using a central document repository with version and editing control. |
The Microsoft Office EPM Solution is built on a flexible platform that can be customized 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 organization can work together to continually improve processes, increase efficiency, and facilitate knowledge sharing, driving a sustainable return on your investment.