Optimizing Your PMO with OpenAir

The function of a project management office (PMO) is to bring order and standardization to project management practices. It achieves this by instituting defined standards and monitoring and control mechanisms to ensure they are followed. Advanced tools like OpenAir allow you to optimize your PMO using clear, well-defined standards. In so doing, you enjoy the following benefits:

• Consistency: a set of templates ensures all projects provide similar information in the same format
• Efficiency: avoid wasting time designing tools and processes to manage projects, ability to consolidate information quickly, save time spent in orienting stakeholders around the format of templates and reports
• Speed: faster project delivery
• Probability: projects executed using the same methodology
• Control: projects executed to the required standards by ensuring oversight of project delivery

The benefits of setting up a PMO supported by OpenAir are tremendous. However, only a few users know how to optimally configure their PMO processes with OpenAir, which limits their ability to reap the full benefits of OpenAir’s project management features. This article provides tips on setting up, controlling, and managing projects in OpenAir as well as communicating within your organization and with customers about the progress and health of projects.

PMO Standardization and Efficiency in OpenAir

Many users wish to standardize their projects in OpenAir as much as possible but need to know how to proceed. Fortunately, you can configure OpenAir to ensure reporting and consistency across the organization while enjoying benefits such as efficiency, faster deliveries, and control. The three common ways include:

• Defining the set of projects delivered consistently and using project templates to control such projects. Using the same project templates for different projects saves the time it would have taken to set up each project from scratch.
• Having a consistent approach in delivering oversight and tracking the status of projects. In other words, have consistent reporting, delivery, oversight, and status tracking model across all projects.
• Setting standardized processes and procedures for phase/task structure that aligns with your pricing model and initiatives for similar projects.

Using Project Templates

A project template compiles the guidelines and procedures the project management team needs to start and execute a project. OpenAir has a set of project templates to systematically set up and document various project activities such as project planning, goal setting, work schedule creation, and cost management.

Templates in OpenAir often have a phase and task structure along with other items you might need to copy from, including bookings, assignments, budgeted hours, and generic resources. The copy option lets you select and include different project items to have in your project when setting up a new project. You can pick a template based on the type and nature of the project and further tweak it to include all the terms of the contract or project. The feature enables you to save the time and process of setting up a new project.

Using Form Permissions

Form permissions is another helpful project management tool for controlling the data you input into your projects. Form permissions are useful when you don’t want users to edit certain types of information, such as budgets, budgeted hours, or cost centers. This feature allows you to modify the information you and users see on a given form. Form permissions come in two ways:

• Simple role-based permissions: it is the most straightforward form permission. Click the light bulb and go field by field regarding what fields are required, which are read-only, and which are hidden.
• More complex permissions: another option for a more complex configuration of fields that expands beyond the user role. The option lets you hide fields without necessarily going through field by field, role by role, etc.

Using Status Tracking

As an OpenAir user, you want to be able to flag projects. The software lets you do that. You can flag projects as either “red,” “yellow,” or “green.” You can flag a project in its entirety based on these parameters or flag various aspects of the project based on budget, scope, or resource as the three main sets of status fields. The yellow and red statuses imply that you are off track as far as your project is concerned.

The status tracking feature lets you have detailed visibility of your projects and can track their progress and performance. Even better, you can tweak OpenAir to auto-generate status reports on your projects periodically, say, every week for projects in a “red” or “yellow” state.

Newsfeed feature

Within the status tracking feature is a newsfeed functionality in the project list view. When you mark a project as red or yellow, you must include notes for the status. As such, the newsfeed tracker will provide a history of the project and details on why you are off track. Newsfeeds are available on role permission so you can establish what roles can view or edit this information.

Issues (Items) Feature

Issues, or items feature, is built out of tracking project statuses or risks. Common use cases include action, status, and risk tracking. For instance, the risk field reveals all the risks linked to a project. The feature can provide complete information regarding the project’s status, what risks are associated with the project, and what actions are needed to move forward.

Communication

Communication is essential in project management and a crucial part of PMO standardization. A useful communication feature in OpenAir, as far as project management is concerned, is budget alters. It lets you configure emails based on the percentage of the consumed budget. For instance, you can script the software to send a budget alert once a project hits an agreed budgetary threshold, say 50%.

Next to budget alerts is a notifications feature. There are two common types of notifications: during project stage changes and when the project owner makes some modifications. You can also create custom notifications based on your information needs. For example, create a custom notification for when a manager is assigned to a project.

Lastly are the reports, which are another important piece of information regarding project management. Reports on project dashboards can be useful in creating generic reports and have complete visibility of your project. Project dashboards are a nice shortcut to incorporating project reports than creating those reports from scratch.

Project dashboards are useful for project reporting. But they’re only useful for someone with access to OpenAir. You won’t give your customers access to your OpenAir account to access project data and information. So, in some cases, you will need to create scheduled or on-demand reports. You can schedule such reports to be sent to customers automatically via their contacts integrated into the system.

The benefits of setting up a PMO in OpenAir are tremendous, including standardization, efficiency, and communication about the status of projects with internal stakeholders and with customers. To learn more about setting up a PMO using Openair, watch our on-demand webinar or contact us to talk with one of our OpenAir experts.