By Scott Baker, Director of Development, Elsinore Technologies

Almost every industry has concerns about how to manage complex, large-scale projects effectively. It is a difficult, high-stakes problem, one that can result in millions of dollars in cost overruns due to unexpected events or unforeseen delays. As a result, industry expectations have focused on project managers to deliver project-planning solutions that keep product delivery on time and within budget.

Regardless of the size or complexity of a project, proven project management tools are being adopted to aide in the visualization, documentation and implementation of the work required at each phase of the product lifecycle. Project management tools like Microsoft Project for project management and Visual Intercept for issue management are replacing intuitive project management techniques with tangible, enterprise-level solutions.

Although resource and project planning tools are well-established components in the project manager's tool set, issue management is typically handled outside the framework of a formalized tool. After outlining the elements of and support tools for Enterprise Project Management (EPM), this white paper will focus on the ways that issue management software can leverage and maximize resource and project planning software, and the many benefits that users can obtain as a result.

Enterprise Project Management: The Foundation of Any Successful Project

An organization that wants to stay in the forefront of its industry needs a well-defined Enterprise Project Management (EPM) solution, one that enables project management from the top down, yet maintains a bottom-up view of individual employees, projects and budgets. A formalized EPM solution is comprised of the following five basic components:

1. Resource Management: Categorizes project resources based on skills or talents (also known as skills inventory). The project manager uses this component to identify the resources that best meet the needs of each required task.
2. Project Management: This component is normally any application that schedules, tracks and reports on individual projects. Specifically, the project management component reports time and processes, showing how they compare against assigned tasks and work breakdowns. Project data can be visually interpreted through graphical representation in common industry-standard views such as Pert and Gantt charts.
3. Engagement Management: The ability to track, analyze and report on key milestones and tasks for a project plan is dependent on determining the actual state of the plan. In tracking this state, the engagement management component can identify potential issues as they arise. This component provides a more proactive approach to project management and is the key to affecting the correct change and direction to the plan.
4. Knowledge Management: This component helps project personnel grasp and re-apply knowledge and experiences from one task to the next, and from one project to the next. Furthermore, it can identify and promote best practices and trends while providing education on issues worth avoiding in the future.
5. Content Management: This component is used to publish the progress of the project to its stakeholders. Content management can be used at any level of the organization and may rely on service automation for automatic plan updating and issue notifications, or provide an interactive interface to commit plan changes based on external, but related, causes.

EPM Implementation Support Tools Defined

Once the EPM elements are identified, implementation is achieved through the formal use of compatible project management tools that specifically address each component of the EPM solution.

One tool should address labor, contractors, recruitment and all other forms of resource management. This tool should enable realistic allocation and optimization of resources prior to creation of the project plan.

Another project management tool should provide the foundation necessary to effectively build a project plan, update the plan based on calculations and data input and provide a mechanism to exchange information among team members and other applications.

Once a plan is created and resources have been allocated, details are required to properly engage each section of the project, increase the project's knowledge base and amend supplemental content. These last EPM components should be satisfied collectively by a tool that both performs comprehensive issue management and offers integration capabilities into the other component(s) of the complete solution. The issue management tool should, at a minimum:

• be process-oriented
• monitor events in real-time
• use a defined workflow architecture
• offer a central information repository
• store all relevant data and process history

The Importance of Issue Management

Issue management process-orientation provides knowledge about the product life cycle, the issue status within that life cycle and how issues/incidents are routed throughout various parts of the organization. In other words, the issue management system must provide a formal framework within which issues can be managed from project conception to completion.

Issue management must occur in real-time in the sense that the system directs the resources of the organization toward elements of work on a daily, even hourly, basis. The issue management system must incorporate mechanisms to keep stakeholders continually apprised of the status of issues (i.e., e-mail notification), as well as when action is required in response to those issues.

To measure project progress, the project manager compares planned work against reality. Microsoft Project establishes the initial comparison value, the plan's baseline. The baseline is a representation of key elements of the schedule for which future comparisons will be made. The comparable information must then be provided by the issue management system, which supplies the project manager with current factual state information based on the reality of the work being conducted by the resources.

An effective issue management system must have a well-defined workflow architecture. At each phase, supplemental information should be added, supporting attached files, and a history maintained. The workflow is a means of effectively moving and managing the issue from its conception to its closure while maintaining a defined state at any specific time. This state value provides real-time feedback of the ongoing issues related to the project plan to the project manager, effectively adding definition to the percent complete value for the tasks in the related project.

In addition to providing real-time feedback, the issue management system must also have a centralized repository that becomes the platform for communications among team members. Through the issue management system, the manager should have access to that detailed intercommunication, within the context of the planning environment. In addition to fostering better communication, a centralized data repository provides a means of transforming any task into an object that becomes part of a formalized process.

Additionally, an issue management system should provide a wealth of contextual information about issues relevant to the successful completion of the plan. When issues that can potentially impede the progress of the plan are identified, the issue management system must provide answers to the who, what, when, where, why and how questions before any decisions are made.

Applying all of these issue management aspects to the plan is crucial to the ongoing management of a project. Since an effective issue management system most accurately reflects the state of issues on a continual basis, there is obviously a need to bring the issue management system into the project management process.

A Microsoft-Centric Solution for EPM Success

Which specific tools provide the most effective EPM solution? While different environments require different tools, the remainder of this paper will focus specifically on the Microsoft arena. In our experience, the tools that enable the most successful EPM implementations are Microsoft Project and Elsinore Technologies' Visual Intercept Enterprise Issue Management System, which includes Visual Intercept and Visual Intercept Project. An EPM implementation should also include a Microsoft-based workforce management solution that best addresses each user's requirements.

Workforce management solutions are comprised of products and services that allow organizations to manage labor, contractor and recruitment. These solutions address the resource management needs of EPM by providing high-level decision support based on resource talent inventories, project forecasting and budget snapshots. Workforce management solutions allow realistic allocation of resources when they are optimized prior to creating the project plan.

Microsoft Project, the world's leading project management tool, provides the foundation necessary to effectively build a project plan, and offers a form of data automation that enables changes to the plan based on calculations and data input. It also establishes a mechanism to exchange information among team members, and, more importantly, other applications.

Elsinore Technologies anticipated the issue management requirements of EPM and produced an integral solution, the Visual Intercept Incident Management System, to bind issue and project management. Visual Intercept Enterprise is the only project-oriented, Microsoft-centric, enterprise-ready issue management system available. It fulfills the EPM issue management requirements with its real time, process-oriented features that support a shared repository of detailed information. These issues are promoted through a defined workflow to completion. In addition, this suite offers a native interface to Microsoft Project through Visual Intercept Project, extending its capabilities and bridging the gap between the individual components of the EPM solution.

Visual Intercept Project constructs and maintains relationships between Microsoft Project and Visual Intercept. By joining these applications, Visual Intercept Project facilitates dynamic project management. Tasks, bound to incidents, link information about the context within which the task will be completed, such as current state, history, supplemental description and supporting documents. Resource relationships enable automatic email notification and workload analysis. The hierarchical nature of the plan is preserved by the relationship of summary tasks to Visual Intercept projects.

In addition, Visual Intercept Project provides an import/export mechanism for transferring data between Microsoft Project and Visual Intercept. This provides project managers with a way to automatically incorporate the plan into the issue management system, or supplement the plan with new information captured by the issue management system.

Finally, a data analysis tool within Visual Intercept allows the manager to play "what if" scenarios to determine whether milestones and end dates will be met based on the actual state of the information within the issue management system. The results of the analysis provide the manager with an efficient and accurate way to identify potential problems.

On The Road to Success

Solid project management is a goal for every organization. A well-defined and well-implemented Enterprise Project Management solution is a major step towards reaching this goal. A solution that supports the five areas of resource, project, engagement, knowledge and content management can be achieved with the adoption of the right tools. Having the right tools does not in and of itself solve the problems of project management; however, it does provide the framework within which these problems can be addressed successfully.

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