Successful PMOs understand the importance of two key factors in project and portfolio reporting: visibility and insight. Without both components, project managers and senior management will not know the health or status of projects, their risks, or their successes – paralyzing them when it comes to making critical and timely decisions that are necessary to keep the organization and its projects on track. The most effective way to gain this crucial visibility and insight, thereby influencing project outcomes, is through targeted dashboards.

Targeted dashboards empower communication and discovery.

To report the information that decision makers need, dashboards need to be succinct, timely, and tailored to their audience. They should inform and guide key stakeholders by providing data that is not only quantitative but qualitative.

The PMO dashboard should:

  • Report statuses by measuring progress towards goals. This can be accomplished visually through indicator bars featuring percentage-complete metrics and colored symbols (e.g. red, yellow, and green) communicating the overall health of a project – or several projects.
  • Present timely data by aligning up-to-date information with decision-making cycles. While project managers demand just-in-time data to quickly make project adjustments based on bottlenecks and issues, executives need current data to support strategic decision-making and ensure portfolio success.
  • Identify risks by including specific metrics to highlight areas of concern. Colored symbols not only highlight overall health of a project from a risk perspective, they also provide more specific observations on the quantity and duration of open risks.
  • Recognize process bottlenecks by providing insight into specific processes. Drilling down into specific project phases and their respective metrics, dashboards can help identify potential issues. For example, test metrics are good indicators of the quality of deliverables and a project’s ability to stay on schedule.
  • Evaluate performance by quickly and easily communicating through high-level metrics. For example, time to market (i.e. actual time versus budgeted time), return on investment, and resource utilization are all good indicators of project performance.

Projility provides dashboard intelligence with Hammerhead.

Our team assists clients in implementing Microsoft Project Server and their cloud-based PPM solution, Project Online. These powerful software solutions serve as essential backbones for project management. Hammerhead adds dashboard intelligence on top of these tools, delivering key metrics directly to decision makers – all with the simplicity of a visual, graphically-driven dashboard.

The information that executives and managers need is right at their fingertips, organized in a way that they want and need to see it. Intuitive mechanisms spotlight risks, bottlenecks, and other issues so that resources can be adjusted appropriately. And by filtering out what isn’t in an individual user’s scope of control, no one wastes time acting on unnecessary items.

Hammerhead provides complete role-based visibility. Dynamic dashboards present data on a granularity level that matches the demands of the decision maker. With this targeted clarity, smart decisions can be made at every level, at every interval – throughout the entire portfolio lifecycle.

Hammerhead clients have seen:

  • Reduced reporting cycles of 15-20%
  • Improved resource utilization up to 20%
  • Reduced customization costs of PPM tools, totaling 25%
  • Decreased training costs of 20%

Decision makers at all levels must have the proper information and data to accomplish their objectives. By implementing Hammerhead with its targeted PMO dashboards, enterprises can realize impressive results. Hammerhead gives businesses agility and intelligence, influencing project portfolio outcomes and setting them up for success.

Projility provides expert solutions for effective change. We offer enterprise portfolio and project management solutions based on Microsoft Project Server and Project Online, with tailored dashboard reporting, analytics, and decision-making tools via our Hammerhead technology. Projility also implements professional services automation systems established on Microsoft Dynamics CRM Project Service, and presents cloud-based strategies, migrations, and hosting solutions through Microsoft Azure. Contact us for more information.