3 Best Practices for Project Management Oversight in OpenAir

Project management is far more than just defining tasks, creating timelines, and finding resources. It’s also about keeping track of project health and surfacing problems and potential issues. In the best of circumstances, project management offers a crystal ball, providing a view into the future and uncovering the risks that may lie ahead without mitigation or management.

Using the tools within NetSuite’s OpenAir, and with some customizations, project managers can simplify and even enhance each of these. When combined with best practices for project management in OpenAir, project management and leadership can fine-tune performance and even avoid costly project issues.

Monitoring Project Progress

OpenAir offers a range of standard views out of the box that can provide a 50,000-foot view of projects. For instance, the project list view – the most basic of views in OpenAir – provides a filterable view of all of your projects. You can see their stage, filter by the project owner, and even narrow the view to just your projects. Depending on the features you’re using in the platform, you can also see planned, worked, approved, and billed hours.

Combined, the information in the project list view tells a story of where the project is today and indicates its trajectory. For example, if a project is planned to take 12 hours and is already at 10, it’s time to ensure it is nearing completion.

Newsfeeds within OpenAir can also enhance the visibility and understanding of a project’s health at a glance. This little-used feature released just a few years ago can be added to your project list view and many other views.

It’s not like the typical newsfeeds we see with social media applications and even in some CRMs. Instead, it’s like a tag that can help users understand project health with just a glance. We spend more time talking about how OpenAir newsfeeds can enhance your project list view and other project management oversight opportunities in our recent webinar.

Project Reporting

Where views can give you a quick, high-level view of where projects are at, reports can provide you the data and information you need to drill down into, offering insights into project performance and trends from a host of different perspectives.

There are some key reports within OpenAir that provide critical information and guidance on projects and how they are going – or even how they went. These reports can offer a wealth of information on project data, such as:

• Planned hours vs. booked hours
• Timesheet hours
• User hours summaries
• Costs
• Project margins
• Budgets

Not all of that information needs to be viewed at the detailed data level. Sometimes you simply need an overview of what the data is saying so that you can dive into the elements that are relevant or that are causing concern. This is an excellent use for dashboards.

Dashboards are ideal for a quick, graphical depiction of the underlying reports. These are refreshed nightly and are built against the same data that sits in a report. Plus, dashboards offer the best option for spotting trends.

Trending can be very important because it’s part of the crystal ball that uncovers what the future may hold. That ability to see roadblocks and issues, and avoid or mitigate them, is one of the most powerful tools OpenAir provides for projects. For instance, if we can see that a resource on a project is well under their planned hours but high on their percent complete, we can predict that we may need work for that team member in the near future. That same information can also let us review margin projections and project costs to see if that fact might help with project overrun.

Alerting

Knowing where a project is at and what its current health is, of course, valuable information. However, having an early warning system that lets you proactively handle potential problems is even better. This is where system alerting can come in handy.

Alerts can be set up against a number of triggers within OpenAir. An alert might be triggered on a newsfeed status, a percent complete, when you’re nearing a predetermined budget threshold, and so on.

OpenAir has always offered a level of scripting within the platform and to email. Unfortunately, today we’re inundated with email, and, occasionally, those alerts just become more noise in our inbox. With a bit of scripting, as Top Step has done now for several clients, alerts can be sent to more immediate and useful channels. For instance, alerts can be sent to messaging platforms like Slack. Recently, Top Step was able to implement the ability to text users, as well. While the initial use was for timesheet reminders, the ability to text information from OpenAir triggers can be adapted to meet a variety of alerting needs.

Conclusion

OpenAir’s tools are purpose-built to help give you the best understanding of your projects, where they stand, and where they are headed. Using standard views for quick project updates, reports to drill down into project performance details, and messaging to proactively drive awareness and corrective action, following these best practices will enhance the success rate of your projects.

Some of the items we’ve discussed here and in our webinar, Best Practices: Implementing Project Management Oversight in OpenAir, require some customization and scripting to bring into your implementation of your PSA. If you need help with these enhancements and changes or have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at Top Step. We’ve helped hundreds of customers get the most out of their OpenAir platform, and we can help you as well.

Some of the items we’ve discussed here and in our webinar, Best Practices: Implementing Project Management Oversight in OpenAir, require some customization and scripting to bring into your implementation of your PSA. If you need help with these enhancements and changes or have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to contact us at Top Step. We’ve helped hundreds of customers get the most out of their OpenAir platform, and we can help you as well.