Project Management Information Systems (PMIS) are, in my experience, sort of a footnote in formal project management training, and I think that’s a shame. I hear leaders asking for them without knowing they’re asking for them all the time. It usually sounds something like:
“We need to have a clear sense of who is working on what.”
“Do we have capacity to take on this project?”
“Are we on track to achieve our goals this year?”
Most businesses have robust ERP systems to manage and monitor operations data, but applying similar discipline to project data often goes by the wayside. Different areas may keep informal project lists in spreadsheets or slide decks wherever they store the bulk of their files, but without a central “source of truth” for what is being worked on, it becomes difficult to make decisions about how to allocate and adjust resourcing. And when leaders ask for a summary, it’s a lot of manual work to put it together.
A well-designed and managed PMIS alleviates the burden of collecting and summarizing status reports because the current state of work is regularly updated across the organization, and key information can easily be rolled up to dashboards at any level. It also supports day-to-day work by:
Providing visibility to interdependency between workstreams
Enabling a quick understanding of how work is allocated across team members
Clearly showing how all work is connected to overall objectives
Making it totally unambiguous who is accountable for what
For all the benefits of PMIS, they’re not without their pitfalls. Teams need to be focused on delivering value without being too bogged down by reporting on it, so there is a fine balance between having a perfect model of the body of work and frustrating your team by constantly typing updates in boxes.
It’s almost an embarrassingly nerdy thing to say, but setting up and operationalizing these systems is one of my favorite things to do. If you’re looking to get a better handle on the who/what/when/why of projects across your organization, I’d love to work with you to understand what work needs tracking, how it all fits together to achieve your objectives, determine which software platform is best for you, and work with your team to integrate it seamlessly into their routine.
Get on my calendar today, and we’ll talk more about how to get you crystal clear about your project work and give you the peace of mind of knowing your organization is firing on all cylinders!
