Enterprise Project Management

Enterprise Project Management

The Microsoft Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution streamlines the governance and execution of portfolios of projects throughout their life cycles – from proposal to post-implementation tracking of results. By improving the decision making, communication, risk management, and productivity within management processes, the EPM Solution helps you improve quality and project success rates, reduce cycle times, and increase throughput, resulting in increased ROI across your portfolios

The EPM Solution provides your enterprise with interfaces that have been tailored for specific roles such as portfolio
managers, stakeholders, project managers, team members, and resource managers. For each role, the application centralizes
relevant views, tools, and management controls for the projects and resources across your organization.

The Microsoft EPM Solution coordinates and supports the work of these roles across four key processes in the portfolio life cycle:

Please spend a few minutes reading this brochure to learn about the specific features and benefits offered for each of these processes, as well as the usability, agility, and robustness of the application technology.

Consolidated and centralized access to the most current information on every project in your portfolio helps improve visibility and accountability across your organization. This example shows a web-based dashboard view of all active projects and their current status organized by sponsoring department.

Portfolio Optimization

Use an integrated set of tools for managing your portfolios of projects throughout their life cycles – inception, alignment with business strategies, prioritization and selection, management of project execution, and monitoring project results.

The EPM Solution provides tools to help you optimize investments across your project portfolios. This example shows a selection recommendation based on a value score based on investments in prioritized business strategies, available resources, project dependencies, and mandatory projects.

Resource Management

Automatically account for work assigned to all resources, materials, an dinancials across all projects using a centralized resource pool. Robust Web-based reporting and analysis tools provide rich insight and forecasts of resource needs throughout the project life cycle.

Feature

The EPM Solution consolidates and centralizes information on available resources and assigned tasks across all projects. Resource profiles can be tailored to allow analysis by roles, skills, locations, etc. This example shows a resource utilization forecast for a particular role over time, highlighting a period of significant over-allocation that will most likely cause contention for resources.

Team Collaboration

Leverage familiar team communication and collaboration capabilities to provide centralized, Web-based workspaces for each project.

Feature

Through an automatically created, centralized Webbased project workspace for each project team the EPM Solution provides ready access to project information including: schedules, tasks & assignments, and risks & issues. Additionally, the solution uses familiar SharePoint collaboration tools such as robust document libraries, team calendars, workflows, and e-mail notifications. This example shows how project team members can access and directly update progress on their tasks from the workspace.

Project Management

Help project managers create work breakdown structures and schedule, assign, and track tasks with a Microsoft Project Professional desktop deployment.This robust and familiar project management interface seamlessly integrates with the EPM server to provide team collaboration, resource management, and portfolio management capabilities. The EPM server transparently aggregates project information to feed dashboards and analysis tools, to provide automated notifications, and to improve work coordination.

Feature

Value

• Improve the focus and management of resources by
• mitigating risks and resolving issues.
• Reduce project cycle time by reducing latency between critical path tasks.
• Improve team productivity with consistent communication of work priorities.
• Enable best practices and continual improvement of project management processes.

The EPM Solution enhances Microsoft Project on the desktop and provides a centralized view of resource profiles and availability, allowing the project manager to work with enterprise information, such as project, task, and resource attributes. This example shows the work breakdown structure (Gantt view) for a project, with a window open for assigning project resources.

Enterprise Project Management Solution Technology

Leverage Microsoft Office System 2007 technologies to provide a robust, familiar, and cost-effective enterprise platform. Whether installing the pre-integrated solution out-ofthe- box, or extending the solution with integration to existing ERP, financial, HR, and/or other enterprise applications, users will enjoy such advantages as:

• Familiar Microsoft SharePoint user interfaces for centralized management views, analysis tools, team collaboration, document management, and workflow
• Tight integration with Microsoft Office personal productivity products (Outlook, Word, Excel, Visio, etc.)
• Transparent offline capabilities for working with projects and documents
• Seamless Windows authentication (users do not need another user id/password)
• Powerful, scalable, and robust Microsoft SQL Server database back-end and reporting & analysis tools
• Flexible configuration to support multiple processes and organizations that have project or portfolio management needs In addition, the Microsoft Office System enterprise platform offers many benefits and advantages over standalone applications for IT, including:

Agile support of additional enterprise applications,
while maintaining:
• High user familiarity with consistent user interfaces
• Common technology platform services and management
• Common IT support/administration skills and processes Robustness
• Consistent feature/functionality across applications
• Flexible security models
• Reliable and scalable performance Sustainability
• Data, application, and process integration
• Extensibility and integration with other enterprise applications
• Continuity and long-term viability