Keeping Stakeholders Informed

One of the primary purposes of a Project Server-based EPM system is to keep the status of active projects accurate, timely, and visible. Executive stakeholders and sponsors are often especially interested in the high-level status of a collection of related projects, often called a portfolio or program, and want to drill into the details of a specific project only when they see some indication of a problem. The Project Center in PWA is where executives and other stakeholders can most easily see multi-project status at a glance. The Project Center can be substantially customized with display options and custom views, as we’ll see here.

Jo Brown is an executive at A.Datum Corporation and oversees several of the projects under way there (she manages the project managers). Jo relies on the project managers within her organization to keep their project status accurate and uses the Project Center as the primary way to view project status. When she sees something in the Project Center that concerns her, she digs deeper into the project details and then consults with the project manager.

1. Jo Brown logs on to PWA and sees her custom Home page.

2. Jo navigates to the Project Center and, in the View box, selects A.Datum Executive Summary.

The Executive Summary view displays each project as an item on a Gantt chart, as well as status indicators for the overall budget and schedule. This is one of several custom views that the Project Server administrators at A.Datum Corporation have created to better meet the needs of their stakeholders. As with other views in PWA, Jo can alter this view to focus on the data in which she is most interested or switch to another view.

The Executive Summary view is sometimes called a stoplight view because it represents key project status measures (in this case, budget and schedule) with green (good), yellow (moderate problem), or red (major problem) indicators. Jo likes this view because she can scan for the “red light” projects and focus her limited time on those projects to determine what is causing the budget or schedule variance.

3. Jo can see that work is under way on the 100X DVD Drive project. Jo clicks the project’s name to view the schedule directly in PWA.

Like other stakeholders at A.Datum Corporation, Jo Brown can get a wide range of details about projects, depending on her interest.