Making Effective Business Decisions Using Microsoft Project

Tim Runcie, Doc Dochtermann

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781118097397
• eBook ISBN: 9781118330265
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Industrial Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

A guide to Microsoft Project that focuses on developing a successful project management strategy across the organization to drive better decisions

Making Effective Business Decisions Using Microsoft Project goes far beyond the basics of managing projects with Microsoft Project and how to set up and use the software. This unique guide is an indispensable resource for anyone who operates within a Project Management Operation (PMO) or is affected by the adoption of project management within an organization. Its focus is to provide practical and transitional information for those who are charged with making decisions and supporting corporate and strategic objectives, and who face cost and resource constraints.

Because more and more companies are aligning project management with their business strategies, the book not only provides guidance on using Microsoft Project and teaching project management skills, but also includes important information on measuring results and communicating with the executive branch. It also provides valuable guidance in using SharePoint Server for social networking and working within a team.

Clearly written and presented, the book:

• Covers work management using Microsoft Project at multiple levels within an organization
• Focuses on using Microsoft Project 2010 to integrate and support overall organizational strategies
• Includes hundreds of graphics, screen shots, and annotations that make it the most accessible and usable guide available on the subject

Making Effective Business Decisions Using Microsoft Projec t is a valuable reference for project managers at all levels, and it sets a new standard for training manuals used by businesses that teach courses on project management using Microsoft Project.

CHAPTER 1

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE: KNOWLEDGE OF KEY SUCCESS INGREDIENTS FOR PROJECT SERVER 2010

IN THIS CHAPTER

This chapter helps set the stage for the deep-dive and thought-provoking tour we will be taking in establishing a good enterprise project portfolio management (PPM) system.

We focus on the importance of leveraging key technology and methodology components to help create a successful foundation for meaningful reporting and maximization of PPM technologies.

We review different types of lifecycles and how to work toward alignment through business and project lifecycles to leverage the power of Project Server’s engine to reinforce best practices. We show how to work toward an end game of simple visuals and dashboards that enable business leaders, project managers, and even team members to participate in the success of their projects and what we refer to as “one version of the truth.”

What You Will Learn

• Different key focus areas you need to address in establishing a strong PPM system
• The importance of lifecycle, phases, and stages to simplify and automate management, grouping, and reporting
• How to blend technology with methodology
• Understand the difference between Project 2010 and Project Server 2010
• How to scale Project Server 2010 from top down (portfolio planning) to bottom up (detailed and task planning) and how to leverage either or both

MAXIMIZING PPM INGREDIENTS, CULTURE, AND TECHNOLOGY FOR BUSINESS SUCCESS

In the world of business, the drive to getting good business intelligence (BI) has focused predominantly on the tools used to expose and graphically represent that information. Face it; BI dashboards are cool (for the most part), and the end users want to see whiz-bang graphics, nifty graphs, and other stunning visuals.

While these tools to depict information are absolutely critical to enabling more effective data analysis, they are not what BI is all about. BI is about understanding data to help make your business more productive. The end goal of any BI strategy should be to enable better understanding of the data.

Three key elements facilitate better understanding of the data: technology, process and, most important, people. Technology always gets the front row in the discussion, but it is—in our opinion—the least important. It is relatively easy to deploy technology to support business intelligence; hundreds of vendors can help you do this. However, the process and people parts of the equation are much more complex and require systemic organizational realignment and investment.

BI is an enabler that must be deeply interwoven into core business processes. Similarly, the act of transforming data into intelligence must be executed by professionals who are competent in data analysis. Companies that embed BI techniques into their core business processes and develop competency within each business unit are able to exploit the power of business intelligence. The ones that pursue BI through a technology-driven approach get lots of cool graphs, but they don’t get information that allows them to make actionable decisions.

Process Side of the Equation

Companies that see BI as strategic to their success embed BI deeply into their core processes. Just take a look at Wal-Mart. BI is pervasive throughout every aspect of its supply chains, from inventory management, to pricing analysis, to store profitability. Information is centralized, real time, and powers the company’s core processes.

Wal-Mart would not be as successful as it is without intelligence as its backbone. There are other examples as well: Continental Airlines and customer loyalty, Dell and direct to customer, just to name two. Each of these companies has intertwined BI into its organization to drive actionable decisions. In the case of Continental, identifying its most loyal customer and determining how to provide them with special treatment continues to grow their continued support and expand their customer base through the use of the information analyzed. In the case of Dell, determining promotion and bundle targeting, this namely being use of information to maximize customer purchases based upon their needs for similar features or components to increase the revenue of each purchase. Companies that view BI as an effort driven by information technology (IT) will extract limited value from it.

BI can be embedded into every core process in an organization. Here are some examples:

• Human resources (HR) intelligence. This area involves deriving deep understanding of organizational structure by a number of attributes, including size, cost, level, performance, and so on. As a company needs to grow or shrink, the HR function can easily understand and make recommendations based on deep insights into the organizational structure.
• Finance. The finance organization can have deep insight into the firm’s financial statements by being able to trace from its balance sheet and income statement down to the lowest level of cost detail. Robust BI can also help with robust Sarbanes-Oxley 404 compliance and with understanding product cost structure.
• Quality. Better understanding of product quality can be driven through warranty analysis, defect rates, customer feedback, and the like. By having this information at its fingertips, quality organizations can identify specific root causes of quality issues much more easily.
• Marketing. Marketing is probably the most prevalent area where BI is critical, but often it is not tightly woven into key processes. Obvious areas of focus include customer loyalty, targeting promotions, call center marketing, sales force effectiveness, and many others.
• Supply chain and logistics. This area also is tremendously dependent on sophisticated BI that can power inventory management, supply chain visibility, and better kanban (just-in-time ordering) practices.

People Side of the Equation

While embedding BI techniques into core processes has been challenging for most companies, having individuals on staff who actually can use BI tools, understand data and analytical results, and make decisions based on the data is even more important.

This is a key weakness at many companies, and it often results in suboptimal usage of business intelligence. BI IT professionals are extremely difficult to find; business professionals who have knowledge in data analysis are even harder to find. Part of the problem is that the American educational system (including many graduate schools) does not educate people to analyze and understand data. How many classes in high school require a focus on data analysis? How many classes in college? If America, or any country, wants to continue to be competitive, it must invest more extensively in the analytical competency at an earlier age.

The authors of this book don’t just have degrees in business, nor did we take classes in BI from the local technical training company; in many cases, we were forced to build the infrastructure or engineer tools, technologies, and metadata into common workflows to expose and analyze the data necessary to make good strategic and business decisions. In the 1990s, one of the authors had extensive fieldwork as a database administrator. When that experience is applied to getting to BI and integrating that data to end users, he found that there was a significant gap between what tools could produce and what people could easily grasp. This led to some very deep-dive conversations, and in some cases building systems that could transform information collected and gathered to something that end users could, at a glance, understand and know how to act on.

Major corporations also have largely ignored building an analytical competency. Those corporations that wish to seek an advantage should build a strong group of individuals who understand how to analyze data in each business unit. These individuals should have technical or advanced degrees as well as strong business acumen and be comfortable using highly sophisticated tools to analyze data. They should have deep training in the tool set, have an understanding of their process responsibility, and be empowered to make changes based on the results of analysis.

This is the case at very few companies. Most companies roll out a bunch of tools to a user base that does not possess the skills to use them effectively within the business function. Even where user dependence on a particular BI tool set is prevalent, most users don’t use the tools for deep analysis; they simply base decisions on the reports they receive.

BI is less about technology and more about people and process. Those companies that get it at a chief executive level are going to have a key strategic advantage. One recent example of this is Hewlett-Packard. HP made a major announcement that it was building a large data warehouse to consolidate all of its customer information. This effort was driven by the chief executive officer (CEO) of the company and was obviously a strategic enabler.

Companies that have CEOs who understand the value of BI and who back their words with actions around process integration and competency will be much more successful, while those that relegate BI to an IT thing or don’t leverage or use that information to shape their forward planning and progress, will continue to derive weak benefits from BI.

Business Case

In our work engagements and through many successful implementations of PPM technologies, we discovered that a foundational and essential tool is often overlooked. This tool is the business case. It provides the necessary facts and data for understanding the value, cost, and benefits of implementing a project. It also lists the assumptions used to reach the touted conclusions, the various options considered, and the required cash flow for implementing the project.

One of the keys to making the best decisions is understanding the criteria used to judge and prioritize projects. A company already has projects under way and usually has a list of possible projects to add to that inventory. How do you decide which ones to add, and when to add them? The business case is the fundamental tool for gaining facts and data about each decision criterion to enable apples-to-apples comparisons among projects.

Let us share one invaluable lesson we have learned the hard way: Even “mandatory” projects have options. (“Mandatory” projects are required to be done, perhaps by law or perhaps by your CEO.) Often people will say, “We don’t need to do a business case, we have to do this project because . . .” The truth we have unearthed is that there are multiple ways to meet mandatory requirements. For example, if the requirement is to provide an efficient mode of transport, we could meet it with a motorcycle or a sport utility vehicle. But what are the tradeoffs between these two options? Even though we may have to do it, planning and analysis are still needed; these are accomplished effectively by producing a business case. In addition, a business case coupled with project plans enables scenario and option analysis to aid in the decision-making process.

In particular, note the last part of the definition. A true business case looks at more than just the numbers. It includes financial, strategic, commercial, industrial, or professional outcomes of the project under consideration. Ideally, the business case should have more than one option from which to select, including the do-nothing, or business-as-usual, option. The decision about the project needs to be made by those people with responsibility, accountability, and authority for the resources to be allocated (e.g., people, tools, machines, computers, facilities) to achieve the desired outcome. If you can’t wait to learn more about business cases and making good project investment decisions, feel free to go straight to Chapters 3, 8, and 10. A key question around business cases is: Are we optimizing our capacity?

This question puts into fancy words a simple concept: Are we using our limited money, time, equipment, material, and skilled people to get the biggest bang for the buck? Capacity optimization can also be called portfolio resource optimization. There are two key principles to understand here:

1. Optimizing resources is about balancing the demand for resources with the supply.

2. The primary aim of resource optim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Chapter 1: Business Intelligence: Knowledge of Key Success Ingredients for Project Server 2010
• Chapter 2: Value Proposition by Role of Project Server 2010
• Chapter 3: Meeting CFO Needs with Project/Server 2010
• Chapter 4: The Business Shakes Hands with the Microsoft Project 2010 Platform
• Chapter 5: End Users’ Critical Success Factors: Using MS Project 2010
• Chapter 6: Thinking Local, Going Social: Project Teams Can Thrive Using Microsoft Project Server 2010
• Chapter 7: Better Together: Microsoft Project 2010 Worksites Using SharePoint Server 2010
• Chapter 8: Effective Transition of Strategy and Execution: Program Management Using Microsoft Project Server 2010
• Chapter 9: Intelligent Business Planning and Controlling Using Microsoft Project 2010
• Chapter 10: Intelligent Business Planning and Reporting Using Microsoft Project 2010
• Index