DCP Project & Portfolio Management - PowerSteering
Project & Portfolio Management is provided within DCP by PowerSteering - a leading provider of On-Demand Project and Portfolio Management solutions for military organisations.
Managing Successful Programmes – Effective Programme Management ensures the delivery of real benefits to the end-users of services and risks to this delivery are identified with the appropriate corrective action plan. This ensures that :
■ Interdependencies across the programme between projects are identified and managed.
■ All stakeholders are informed and involved in the programme.
Line of Sight Visibility – PowerSteering provides business managers a framework to align their projects and initiatives with their business goals. By providing Line of Sight Visibility into the Project Portfolio, managers have the information they need to make more effective programme decisions ensuring projects deliver the desired outcomes on time, within budget.
Executive Dashboard – provides a snap shot of critical projects and initiatives, showing at a glance the status indicator, key milestones and any Risks or Issues. Stakeholders can create their own dashboard to include a portfolio of projects key for their area of responsibility. Critical projects can be added to provide rapid access to the project’s progress and risks.
Benefits Tracking – enables organisations to track the costs and savings against individual projects or initiatives. Roll-up reporting against the project hierarchy or user defined categories of projects. By associating the benefits of the project against its status, the programme review board can correctly focus resources.
Work Breakdown Structure – the goal driven hierarchy ensures projects are aligned with the business goals and critical initiatives. A Web-based interface enables users to create a hierarchy of projects that matches the organisations business structure.
Templates & Standard Processes – PowerSteering allows the creation of gated projects with built-in approval processes to maintain strong control over project priorities and budgets. For example this ensures that all projects pass through Main Gate and are approved before further work is performed.
Collaboration – a centralised project space is used to communicate with the project team and manage project deliverables. Threaded discussions are associated with Projects, Documents and Tasks enabling the project team to exchange ideas and feedback. New team members or other interested parties can quickly become informed on the history of the project and the decisions made.
Risk & Issue Management – effective management of a Programme requires constant monitoring of the risks. Risks must be resolved before they become immediate issues. PowerSteering provides a framework to identify and record risks and issues against a project. Roll-up reporting of all risks or issues against the portfolio or programme. Record mitigation plan and corrective actions together with risk priority. Project managers can assign issues as tasks to team members and monitor progress against the corrective action or mitigation plan.
Coherence – a key part of programme management is identifying dependencies across projects and workstreams. PowerSteering enables dependencies between projects to be managed.
MS Project Integration – projects created in MS Project can be imported into PowerSteering enabling rapid integration with existing project data. Work Breakdown structures can be exported to MS Project enabling round trip sharing of project plans with offline users.
Search – advanced searching enables users to quickly scan the portfolio of projects and find the information they need. Users can search across projects, documents, discussions and risks / issues.
Alerts – event-triggered alerts are also sent as emails to enable both team members and stakeholders to be kept informed in real time of events such as project issues or a milestone slippage.
Resource Management - project managers can see at a glance the workload of team members and adjust tasks appropriately. Team members can see calendars with scheduled events such as programme reviews and milestone due dates.
Security – the sophisticated permission system enables customised access levels for specific user groups. This enables project teams to provide access to trading partners or other 3rd parties without compromising security across the whole programme.
Knowledge Management – users can create categories of information that can be shared by projects. Documents can be copied to the knowledge manager for approval and release into the knowledge repository. For example a business case template can be retrieved and expanded by different projects.
Lessons Learned – information learned during the project life cycle can be captured and made available to other project teams in the future. Other project teams can search this information.
Reporting – PowerSteering can produce comprehensive reporting against the programme, portfolio or individual projects. Reports are run in real time ensuring the latest information is displayed. Data can also be easily exported into MS Excel and merged with external data.
Governance – all projects and programmes are subjected to an audit. PowerSteering provides a full history log of all changes to the project information. This enables audit managers to see when project dates or costs were changed.
Baseline – PowerSteering allows users to understand how the project is performing against initial estimates. Project baselines can be created for both the project schedule and project costs. Reports can be generated to compare current progress against the baseline.
