Best Practice Guide For Project Management in OpenAir

As an OpenAir user, you already know that it’s a great tool for professional services management with a lot of flexibility. But did you also know that it’s a powerful tool for managing projects?

 Thanks to OpenAir’s customization, automation, and reporting features, it can be adapted to meet your business’s particular project management needs. Understanding the available features, and how to adapt them effectively will improve your project communication, visibility, and performance.

Streamlining Project Initiation

Setting up a project correctly from the start can be a time-consuming process. It can also be a frustrating one if, like a lot of companies, many of your projects are similar. OpenAir makes it easier to get up and running quickly with a new project through the use of templates.

 Templates not only make project planning easier, they also improve standardization. The real power in OpenAir project templates, however, is in the ability to customize what you use as a template, and what you pull from those templates.

 Existing projects can be used as templates if there is a business need for that, but you can also force only certain plans to be used in this way. Templates include a checkbox to expressly allow it to be used in this manner, giving the PMO control over what can and can’t be copied from. This is ideal for standardization.

 Drilling down further into OpenAir’s project templatization features, you also have control over what you bring into your new plan from the template. Settings like approvers or billing rules can be brought over, while other elements can be left behind. You can even define some settings as defaults while allowing PMs to choose which others should be brought over. This level of granularity is helpful in saving time, especially when combined with OpenAir’s project initiation automation features.

 Projects can be initiated automatically – both as fully-fledged project plans built with templates and rules, or as an empty shell that can be completed manually or by leveraging your template library. This is handy for organizations that use outside systems – like CRMs or financial systems – to instantiate projects into OpenAir. It also furthers OpenAir’s usefulness in creating time savings and promoting standardization.

Improving Project Visibility

Project management has three primary purposes – plan out the hours or tasks associated with a project, manage budgets for the project, and communicate project data like status and risks. Two-thirds of these purposes rely on visibility into the project’s performance at some level. So it makes sense to employ tools that will simplify that process.

 OpenAir offers the ability to quickly see project status using custom fields. The features available go beyond simply adding green, amber, or red status indicators, however. For instance, if an item is amber or red, notes could be required using permission roles and custom fields. Dropdown rules can be configured based on these custom field values as well. It’s even possible with business rules and some scripting to automatically set a project status and provide alerts based on criteria you define.

 Automated alerting can be a very powerful visibility feature. OpenAir offers out of the box alerting and notifications, like budget alerts, as well as the ability to create custom alerting and notifications. For instance, you can receive a weekly alert of all projects that have a status of red or amber. As a best practice, if you’ll be using custom alerts you should turn off the system’s standard alerts to prevent sending multiple notifications.

 Alerting provides a glimpse of where a project is at or on specific elements that need immediate attention. Reporting, on the other hand, offers a comprehensive view of a project’s data. Like alerts, reports can be customized and scheduled to streamline the process and save time.

 Reports can also be shared outside of OpenAir. The system allows for the creation of a contact, with the only requirement being an email address. This opens the option to send scheduled reports regularly to stakeholders that don’t have an OpenAir account. An example might be a weekly usage report sent out to clients, letting them know the number of hours used against a contract or retainer.

Additional Features That Can Improve Communication 

There are a number of other OpenAir features that will make your project management team’s lives easier. A recent addition to the solution is the newsfeed.

 The newsfeed feature resembles a chat application. Each week you can create a new record and assign it a tag, like the current status. Each week you create a new record and apply a tag. The advantage of using the newsfeed over a custom field for tracking status change is that the newsfeed will keep the history of changes, where a custom field does not. Be aware, however, that what is shown in a project’s list view is only the most recent newsfeed.

 The issues feature is another bit of functionality that can be customized to fit your project management workflow. Few customers use the issues table out of the box for its intended purpose. But a few changes to the table and it becomes more useful.

 By renaming the issues table and creating custom fields, you have considerable flexibility in how this tool is used. For example, we’ve seen several clients re-purpose this table to track actions. Depending on how you manage projects, you may have actions that are important but not tracked within the project plan. Leveraging the issues table as an action list provides you visibility into the status of tasks important to the project but not part of the plan itself.

 The PMO is an important part of a professional services organization. It’s in your company’s best interest to use the tools available to streamline and standardize project plan setup, reduce errors, and increase communication and visibility. OpenAir is flexible enough to marry with your internal business processes and rules and improve the efficiency of your project management discipline.

 Interested in additional tips on how to use OpenAir to advance your project management capabilities? Check out our webinar, “Delivery Success with Project Management”, for more information, usage suggestions, and best practices.