Project Oversight: Manage Your Projects Better With These 5 OpenAir Features

Project oversight is the key to ensuring successful project delivery on-time and on-budget. By capturing information across projects, your organization will gain valuable insight into repeatable projects and continuous process improvement areas such as budgeting and estimating. Project oversight includes risk management, performance management, financial management, issue management, communication, and documentation.

The NetSuite OpenAir platform is a valuable tool for keeping project delivery in line with expectations and processes. This article will focus on features that will help you get data out of OpenAir to manage your projects more efficiently.

1. Use the ‘List View’ Within the Project Module

The Project List View (Projects Module > Projects tab) is a list of all projects in any particular stage or all stages. In a quick glance, you can gain valuable insight into your projects by using this high-level view. You can use the column filters to see projects for a certain customer, projects at a particular stage, or only the specific projects you’re in charge of, for example.

One of the ways to get maximum utility out of the Project List View (or any list view), is to customize to see the data you need. Adding the various types of hours including Booked and Planned and/or Budget Hours gives you insight into how your scheduling of resources aligns with your budget of hours. Adding Worked, Gap, and Approved hours provides the delivery burn to ensure you are staying on track with those hours budgets. If you are processing Invoices in OpenAir, then the Income vs. Budget(money) column gives you financial burn at a high level including percent of budget invoiced.

Many of the columns are calculated in real-time by the UI including Gap hours (planned minus worked hours) and Income vs. Budget. Using the list view avoids running reports and provides a quick glance at project health.

2. Apply Project Management Oversight Fundamentals at a Task Level

While the high-level project view provides a quick assessment into the health of your projects, it can also be a bit deceiving, because individual task hour plans may be under or over budget. You can dig into the Task level of a project to break down high-level budget views into components. The task list view can be displayed in a similar fashion to the project list view for consistency of hours analysis.

A good option to enable for the best detailed views is to show the user’s budget and worked/approved hours per task. This is a switch you can enable with NetSuite Support. Once in place, you can easily see which users are over budget or not working on the task as expected, for example. The list view supports viewing information with a variety of sorting options including by task, by employee/contractor, and more to really identify assignment bottlenecks or budgeting/scheduling issues at a person level.

3. Enhance Standard Budget Alerts To Be Proactive

NetSuite OpenAir includes a standard Project Budget alert. This standard alert can be set to run every day and have the system email project owners and others when a project is within a threshold % of budgets – either hours or money. It’s a handy alert, but it only focuses on approved hours or invoiced charges. This means the alert is a reactive alert or you need to set the threshold low enough to be effective as a proactive alert.

OpenAir scripts can be a powerful way to enhance a feature we like, like the Project Budget alert, to be one we love by turning it into a more proactive alert. Top Step scripting services can provide a script that uses worked hours as the driver of budget threshold calculations to drive an alert that knows budgets are close to running out before the timesheet approval step occurs. This gives Project Managers a heads up about budgets use so they can make decisions while reviewing submitted timesheets.

And, as always with scripts, additional controls could be factored in such as ignoring certain types of tasks or projects or varying the threshold for the alert based on planned or budgeted hours.

4. Key Reporting and Dashboards for Project Management Oversight

At Top Step, we are always looking for new ways to help our customers tag their data to make everything easier to consume at a glance and really understand what’s happening on a project. What is more powerful than a trending report of delivery?

We highly recommend running a basic planned versus actual report for budgeting and trending analysis purposes. This report shows how many hours were scheduled (planned) for people versus how many they worked per their timesheet (actuals). This can easily be expanded to also include assigned hours for task/project hours budget view and projected or billed hours to understand how many hours will or have been invoiced to the customer.

Hours aren’t your only budgetary consideration. Cost and financial burn reports are important to run too, and we’ve created several margin-based reports to show margin percentages for projects. These reports can be set to track data over any timeframe you want, whether it’s week-by-week, monthly, quarterly, whatever. Current margin and even forecasted margin at project completion can be a game-changer to the Project Manager that are managing larger or long term project. Properly monitoring reports and dashboards can take your project oversight to the next level.

5. Don’t Forget the News Feed

One of the more user-friendly features added to OpenAir is the News Feed. Much like many social media platforms, it is the place where you can provide and view any updates to the project. There are little emojis you can use, text formatting options and a high-level status field that provide quick health updates for the project.

If you are not aware, the News Feed feature has been improved since its release and now can be integrated to other programs like Slack by using OpenAir Scripting. With so many organizations relying on notification/collaboration tools like Slack, having OpenAir push out the latest updates proactively is a great communication method.

Summary

We have only touched on some of the capabilities OpenAir provides for project oversight. It is worth the time to look beyond your current configuration and take advantage of the extensibility and customizations easily done within OpenAir. In the long run, this will save you time and money and help you manage your project budgets and resources more efficiently and more proactively.

Check out our webinar to learn more about using OpenAir for Project Management Oversight.