Do You Have a A Single View of the Truth?
How many times have project managers and stakeholders in your organization disagreed about something on a project?
Perhaps a team member says the work is nearing completion but the project manager doesn’t have the same level of confidence.
Perhaps a stakeholder remembers the discussion around a decision differently to others on the team and pushes for an alternative outcome.
Perhaps two people look at the same data source and yet come to different conclusions because they are processing the data in different ways.
Whatever the situation, these conversations happen every day, in all kinds of organizations. They don’t cause huge arguments, but they are uncomfortable and the worse thing is that they take up time.
The project manager has to spend time unpicking the conversation and finding out what was said, going back to records or diving into the calculations used to find out why one set of numbers can tell two different stories.
If that situation sounds familiar, then don’t worry. There is good news. The secret to streamlining communication and avoiding these low-level misunderstanding is having a single view of the truth.
Software as a sanity saver
The even better news is that you probably already have enterprise project management tools that will give you the single view of the truth functionality that you need. If you don’t, you’re reading this because you’re probably considering how to improve the capability your PMO function and the way projects are led. Choosing the right software is an important step in stepping up your project management maturity.
Project management tools – when they are set up correctly – give you exactly that. A common view of what is happening on the project.
Set up a few standard reports that run with pre-defined criteria and data filters, and you’ll never have to worry about people interpreting the raw data differently again.
Set your parameters
Do you want all budget figures to exclude tax? Easy. Do you want to standardize the way project resources are budgeted by making estimates effort-based instead of duration-based? No problem.
The PMO can set up these kinds of parameters for central reporting so that every project has comparable data and everyone knows what they are looking at.
Using dashboards and standardized project reporting coming directly from the source data is a straightforward way to increase transparency and build confidence in the information being shared. You’re creating consensus and understanding, which makes the data more useful and speeds up decision making based on it.
Garbage in, garbage out
However, the quality of data in any report relies on the data underneath. Project teams have to be alert to the impact of not submitting data in a timely manner. That makes reports out of date before they’ve even made it to the desk of the decision-maker.
If you need to set up interfaces to other tools, they should be seamless and easy to use. For example, many earned value management systems are actually a complex web of various software that provide information to a central reporting tool. Those interfaces – to the accounting package, and the resource management tool – have to be set up correctly and working perfectly.
There is a culture change required for moving to real-time data entry, and it can take time to adapt to that new way of working. We’ve seen the benefits though, and the amazing impact that a robust enterprise software system can make for project management maturity across an organization, so we can tell you it’s worth it!
Move PMO work online
As maturity improves, and people become used to having their single source of the truth data repository and reports, expectations will rise.
Think about going to your local coffee shop. The server gives you a little biscuit free with every coffee. At first, it feels like a big treat to get something free. After a while, you get used to the free biscuit and it no longer feels special. If you don’t get a biscuit one morning, you end up disappointed. That’s what happens with PMO capability: organizational leaders come to expect the things you used to deliver as ‘special bonuses’.
That’s a good thing: it pushes PMO leaders to constantly tailor and improve their services to truly serve the organization in whichever way that evolves.
One of the things you might see is a greater expectation that more PMO services move online. After all, if they can get a real-time dashboard of project data on their tablet, why not assign resources, process new project requests or send approvals through a digital workflow?
The single view of the truth concept doesn’t just apply to databases of project numbers. It can also apply to workflows and the way work is done: let’s have a single process for requesting resources, or for entering timesheet data and so on.
First steps to consensus building
If that all seems like a step to far, remember that every journey starts out with a small step in the right direction. Think about what tools you currently have available. Standardize the way data is considered by creating standard formulas and processes plus a set of rules for creating reports. That will make data comparable across projects and across project teams.
Encourage project leaders to document how decisions are made about project data and to feed that into a central repository, so that best practice can be shared between all the teams. Look at the rules behind automated project reports and ensure that they use common protocols.
Ultimately, all you want is to remove some of the friction in understanding and responding to the project data available to stakeholders by making it simple to understand. Create reports and dashboards that tell people what they want to know so they don’t have to do data manipulation themselves.
Project management software tools are advanced and can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you these days. How are you going to set yours up so that they serve you and streamline the way people interact with project data?