Vira Enterprise Project Management

In recent years, with general adoption of (IT) governance practices, Enterprise Project Management has become more specific: whereas in the 1990s focus was generally on the management of the single project, in the subsequent decade the focus lay more on the fact that a project is likely to not be the only one in the enterprise. The project co-exists with many other projects in the enterprise, or may be part of one or more programs. It may utilize (human) resources that are shared among other projects.
In order to facilitate governance, it has become essential to be able to manage, monitor, and assess the status of all projects (and other assets, of course) in the enterprise, through a set of (preferably uniform) Enterprise Project Management processes, methods and application packages. Typically, organizations that adopt an Enterprise Project Management way of working might set up a Project Management Office (PMO)/ Enterprise Project Management Office (EPMO, which is said to be more successful than a traditional PMO in addressing the priorities of the organization as its scope is enterprise-wide), might select and adopt a Project Management Methodology like PRINCE2, PMBOK (or create a proprietary method) or follow the concepts of IPMA Competence Baseline as a foundation for development and certification of project managers and their knowledge, experience and behavior. They might even select and implement a software system to support Enterprise Project Management.

The challenges of effective project management involve the ability to schedule, track, and manage all facets of a project and coordinate the efforts of all those involved in the project. Project managers face other growing challenges:

• Geography. The geographic dispersion of most organizations’ work forces requires the ability to collaborate effectively with remote workers and provide a central repository of project information that everyone can access.
• Cost concerns. The project management process has increased in importance and scrutiny as organizations focus on containing costs and achieving a higher ROI on their business initiatives.
•  More stakeholders. Higher visibility of the project management process necessitates the inclusion of additional stakeholders in the project management process who need to have a clear view into project information to monitor progress and easy access to accurate data on project costs, timelines, and resource allocation for informed decision making.

The Vira Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution provides executives and business managers with greater visibility into project performance and a portfolio view of all projects to ensure that they align with business objectives. Project team members will benefit from the EPM Solution’s tight integration with other applications they currently use to better share project information and foster more effective collaboration. The emphasis of the new release of Vira EPM Solution is to widen the number of participants who can access project and resource information and to improve the project management process by streamlining administrative tasks and improving the integrity of project data that is captured.

Key Benefit Areas of Vira Enterprise Project Management

Recent research has identified two key areas where companies are likely to gain benefits by using the EPM Solution to manage their projects. These are increased productivity and improved business performance.

Increased Productivity

EPM Solution offers role-based capabilities that increase productivity for different categories of users based on their responsibilities and the tools and applications that they use.

Improved Business Performance

The adoption of the enterprise project management system provides a framework to standardize project management processes and best practices across an organization. For example, one company uses the EPM Solution to manage 800 to 1000 technology projects each year. Previously, the company’s project managers organized and managed their projects independently, using the standalone version of Project. Using the EPM Solution, company management now has a consolidated portfolio view of all the IT projects under way, can evaluate projects consistently, and can readily identify redundancies and areas of risk.