Utilizing Radar in the Project Management Office
About the Client
The client on whose experience this case study is based is a corporation from the automotive industry with a classic organizational structure consisting of a head office, specialist functions, national and international production sites with business units and departments. An enterprise-wide project steering committee, comprised of board members, heads of departments and individual project and program sponsors, is responsible for monitoring the status of the entire project portfolio, ensuring projects are in line with the company’s strategic goals, and deciding whether an intervention in a particular case is required. The task of the PMO within this structure, in addition to other duties, is delivering a consolidated report on the status of all projects and programs and any other decision-relevant information in time for the meetings of the steering committee. In this regard, the PMO is responsible for preparing analyses, commentary and forecasts and proposing potential alternative courses of action to assist the steering committee.Initial Situation and Challenges
A multitude of stakeholders from various business units, production sites and hierarchy levels of the same company all take part in project status reporting – but do so at different stages of the process, which often makes it difficult to reconcile their interests. As the excerpts from interviews conducted with different parties clearly demonstrate, they each have their own point of view on the matter. It appears that all actors involved in reporting are dissatisfied because their expectations regarding project status reporting are currently being met either insufficiently or not at all.„Filling out status reports is too complicated and time consuming. My project is under control and I don’t see how I would benefit from reporting the process of my project all the time. If something is the matter, I will notify the people who need to know about it.”
„I have to remind people all the time to hand in their status reports or to fill in the missing information – the result is that I can never submit my reports to the board on time and the data is never 100% accurate.”
“Three days before the deadline for sending the consolidated status report to the board, the PMO is basically shut down.”
„We don’t know what is happening in the projects and we have no idea where to intervene – we’re basically flying blind.”
„Could you please provide the missing data on page 278 and comment on it? It would be helpful if a comprehensible status report would be available after the summer break.”
Project managers complain about the amount of effort it takes to fill out status reports and the need to do so regularly, all the while the PMO expresses discontent with poor reporting discipline, late submissions and the low quality of collected data.
Members of the steering committee, in turn, feel that they are not being adequately informed. Not only are the reports that they receive excessively long and generally inconsistent, but their preparation is so laborious that by the time they reach key decision makers, project status information has already lost its relevance. Instead, senior managers wish to be able to access reports at any time and regardless of their own whereabouts, preferably via a self-service tool on their mobile devices.
All in all, it is evident that inefficient and complex information flows not only hinder effective communication and cooperation but also negatively affect the development of projects. This points to an urgent need to improve the quality of reporting by increasing efficiency of existing processes, introducing some degree of standardization and automation, reducing the share of the time-consuming ad hoc reporting, and simplifying distribution of project information.
