Keep Your Projects on Track with These 3 Features in OpenAir

A significant part of good project management is not to be surprised and to always be proactive. A professional services automation tool should enable that goal.

The good news is that NetSuite’s OpenAir does that and in a myriad of ways. OpenAir keeps your projects running smoothly with multiple ways to slice and dice information, view reports and data, and even trigger automated alerts.

The key is to know about the features that you need and leverage them in such a way to achieve your goals. Using and customizing different views, reports, dashboards, and features will help you remain ahead of issues and maintain a high level of visibility.

Project List View

You’re likely aware that there are almost as many ways to view a project as data points you can view. One of these ways is the Project List View.

Why is the project list view so important? Besides being customizable, it allows you to see all the critical elements of a project quickly. It’s filterable so that multiple projects can be seen, but you can also bring your projects to the front of the list, and you can save those views in various ways.

The options to configure this view make it a powerful tool in identifying issues early. The list view can show worked and approved hours, as well as billable for a T&M project. Many of the KPIs you need for driving projects forward and surfacing problems can be seen in this single, high-level view.

One of the additions that you can make to the list view is an at-a-glance view of the newly released newsfeed. With its color-coded status markers, the newsfeed can alert project managers and leaders alike when a project needs attention.

Baselines and Project Outline View

The list view, however, only provides that 10,000-foot view at projects. Drilling down to discover potential red flags requires digging into the project structure a little more. As with many things in OpenAir, there are many ways to accomplish this, including using the project outline view.

One of the nice features of the project outline view is that it can be initiated using baseline data. Using the baseline feature, you’ll have a copy of your project that you can manipulate to get closer to the hours you expect the tasks on a project to take.

This offers the ability to quickly understand where a project might run over or where time has been overestimated based on the expected work. Working with the baseline numbers and updating those, it becomes clear where problems may arise, budgets and estimates might be a problem, and what the percentage complete is overall. The outline can even show some gap information, clearly illustrating the difference between approved hours and those planned and identifying any overage or underage.

Reporting and Dashboards

One of the most useful and powerful features within OpenAir, for both project managers and leaders, are reports and dashboards. These provide a quick view of the health and progress of a project in easy-to-digest and actionable forms.

There are lots of options for reporting. For instance, one increasingly popular report is the project budget, which allows you to set cost or hours budgets within the project and see actuals against them. Importantly, this budget provides the ability to spread out the hours or costs over time, laying these factors out across months or even quarters and offering more control over when expenses and labor costs will hit.

Other reports give you alternate views of your projects. You can look at projects by user, including by planned or booked hours, and marry that to scheduling information. This gives you something close to a crystal ball, with the ability to see where you’re likely to land with a given resource on a project. That way, adjustments can be made well ahead of time if needed. Doing this requires proper setup on the report with inception and end dates, which we talk about more in our webinar, How to Implement a Project Management Oversight in OpenAir.

What adds to the strength and flexibility of the OpenAir project management reports is the ability to put those reports into visual dashboards for easier consumption of the data. You can create a dashboard tab within the home screen, displaying different reports and grouping them appropriately.

Visual dashboards make it particularly easy to spot data trends that need to be addressed before they become full-fledged problems. For instance, a dashboard that shows booked hours may clarify that there is a downward trend over time or that a spike could create a talent shortage if not addressed soon. Trends are easy to spot with the visual reporting a dashboard provides, from margins comparisons to booked hours versus timesheets, to anything else that lends itself to analysis or comparison is a chart or graph.

Conclusion

Keeping projects on track and out of the danger zone requires lots of data, viewed in many ways. To react quickly, that data must be easily digested and show how projects look today and tomorrow. With that knowledge, the challenges that inevitably arise during a project can be identified and mitigated quickly.

What we’ve touched on here is only the tip of the iceberg. There is much more information in our webinar, How to implement a Project Management Oversight in OpenAir. In addition to the webinar, Top Step is here to help, answer questions, and even step in to get your templates and reports in usable and actionable states. Contact us today to see how we can help you streamline your project management and maximize project efficiency and profitability with OpenAir.