Organizations are increasingly managing their activities and processes as "projects". Microsoft has created the Enterprise Project Management (EPM) solution to help organizations better align resources and business activities with strategic objectives, and closely monitor project performance. By enabling real time participation and collaboration on all project activities EPM facilitates resource management, high level reporting and decision-making.

The Solution is effectively used over the Web, via intranet, or an extranet and it benefits all project stakeholders, including:

The EPM solution is robust enough to support your core business and flexible enough to accommodate your existing processes; it's very easy to use and it works with all standard Microsoft applications. The EPM solution can be implemented in phases and more quickly and more cost effectively than other systems that do not take advantage of existing technology.

William George Associates is an approved Microsoft Project Solution Provider that adapts the EPM solution to a company's processes and systems to ensure business objectives alignment. By assessing needs, formulating a rollout strategy, developing project templates, and providing organizational training, WGA ensures successful implementation, quality of execution and consistent utilization.

Please access any of the following sections to get a better understanding of the EPM Solution:

What is the Microsoft Office EPM Solution?
Reasons to adopt EPM?
Who in the organization benefits from the use of EPM?
Why use WGA to implement EPM?
WGA's EPM solution offering

Over the years, Microsoft Office Project software has become a leading project management tool for people who want to make an impact at work by being able to better plan, manage and communicate project information from their desktop. Microsoft Office Project provides the core tools that project managers, business managers, and planners need to manage schedules and resources independently.

More recently, organizations have identified effective collaboration and communication as key factors for achieving project success. Clear communication processes enable project team members to share knowledge efficiently, work collaboratively, and respond quickly when change is necessary. Collaborative interaction between project managers, and project stakeholders facilitates resource management, high level reporting and decision making. As a result, the Microsoft Office EPM Solution was created to:

• Enable organizations to manage their project portfolio effectively.
• Standardize project management processes and best practices across the organization.
• Centrally manage resources based on skills and availability.
• Enable effective communication and collaboration within project teams and with other stakeholders or partners over the Web, an intranet, or an extranet.
• Report across projects in the organization and roll-up scorecard reports.

An extensible, enterprise-scale architecture enables effective integration with other line-of-business (LOB) systems. The picture below depicts the attributes of EPM.

Strategic alignment for enterprise project management

Making your strategic goals a reality requires technology that is robust enough to support your core business and yet flexible enough to accommodate your existing processes. The Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution provides this infrastructure, so your organization can gain visibility, insight, and control its portfolio of projects, as well as improve productivity, reduce cycle times, decrease costs, and increase quality. The Microsoft Office EPM Solution allows you to communicate with resources and other stakeholders, while leaving ultimate control in the hands of the project manager.

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The Top Reasons to adopt EPM include:

1. Project Portfolio Management
   • Identify, prioritize and select projects based on alignment with strategic objectives, and allocate resources accordingly.
   • Create a dashboard to provide visibility into your portfolio to monitor performance. Routinely evaluate and adjust your portfolio of projects for optimal efficiency and productivity.
   • Visualize trends and identify investment gaps to make better decisions, make tradeoffs and pursue new opportunities.
     
2. Real time Collaboration and Communication
   • Provide clear communications so teams can work together effectively and share common goals, especially in geographically dispersed and culturally diverse organizations.
   • Share knowledge, collaborate to complete tasks and deliverables and adjust activities quickly to accommodate project changes and updates through web-based access and MS Tools.
   • Provide latest project information to team members to more efficiently manage their time, prioritize their activities, and make better decisions.
     
3. Significantly improve Project Management
   • Create plans that reflect realistic schedules, resource requirements and budgets to ensure effective delivery and customer satisfaction.
   • Standardize processes and best practices to improve operational efficiencies for lowered costs, faster cycle times, and increased quality.
   • More effectively manage project complexity and capture and document best practices.
     
4. Effective Resource Management
   • Deploy resources across organization so you can put the right people on the high priority projects.
     Accurately assess resource commitments and understand workload trends and capacity to drive staffing strategies.
   • Establish right balance of strategic recruiting and outsourcing.

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1. Executives

   As an executive you can more effectively manage the company's project portfolio by continually identifying, prioritizing, and investing in projects that align with your corporate strategy. By doing so, you can make sure your company's efforts are spent only on activities that contribute to the bottom line. The Microsoft Office EPM Solution enables you to:

   • Fairly evaluate project status and quickly identify at-risk and underperforming projects using roll-up scorecard reports that graphically display key business metrics.
   • Integrate critical project data as Web parts into your executive-level dashboard side-by-side with other critical information for a more complete view of your business.
   • Gain insight into the performance of your overall portfolio by identifying trends and problem areas using powerful analysis tools.
   • Understand the impact of trade-offs and evaluate strategies to mitigate risk using what-if scenario modeling features.

    

2. Project Managers

   Whether delivering products or services, all organizations need to meet project deadlines, budgets, and stakeholder expectations. To maintain customer satisfaction and meet customer expectations, no room exists for project errors or delays.

   To stay competitive, companies are increasingly implementing initiatives to improve their project delivery by continually reducing cycle times, minimizing costs, and controlling quality. These initiatives require skilled people, standardized processes, and superior technology—unified and driven by effective project management.

   The Microsoft Office EPM Solution enables your organization to streamline project management processes for greater performance:

   • Achieve organization-wide compliance and greater efficiencies in project delivery by capturing and deploying best practices and continually improving processes.
   • Consistently meet project goals and attain higher customer satisfaction by creating plans that reflect realistic schedules, resource requirements, and budgets.
   • Gain a deeper level of project governance and control through project performance, issue, and risk tracking capabilities.
   • Comply with government and regulatory requirements by integrating standardized methodologies with your existing project management processes.

    

3. Resource Managers

   People are the most valuable—and often the most expensive—assets of your organization. To maximize productivity and be cost-effective, it is critical to assign the right people to the right project teams.

   Managing people across an organization, however, is complex. Resource information is often controlled in various departments, making it difficult to forecast short- and long-term resource needs accurately. Without a complete understanding of the skills and availability of its staff, your organization cannot strategically hire, deploy, and develop resources that match the needs of your project portfolio.

   The Microsoft Office EPM Solution provides you with powerful resource management capabilities to assist you in achieving the greatest return on your investment in your employees.

   • Better assess resource efficiency and activity across projects by accurately and consistently tracking resource use and workload.
   • Assemble high-performing project teams using staffing tools that help your organization optimize resource allocation and assignments from a central resource pool.
   • Effectively determine hiring needs by forecasting short- and long-term resource capacity and project demands.

    

4. Project Teams

   Effective communication is essential to achieve project success. With clear communication processes, team members can share knowledge, work together smoothly to complete tasks and deliverables, and respond quickly to change.

   Project teams, however, are becoming more dispersed—both organizationally and geographically—threatening productivity and elevating the need for technology that can meaningfully connect team members to maintain coordination and quality.

   The Microsoft Office EPM Solution provides an infrastructure that strengthens collaboration and accountability among all levels of the organization.

   • Empower managers and project teams to make timely, informed decisions by giving them Web-based access to real-time business-critical project data.
   • Increase participation in the project management process by enabling team members to easily manage, track, and report on their project activities through familiar tools, like the Web and e-mail.
   • Realize greater accountability through a central tracking system that enables project teams to record, assign, and resolve issues.
   • Gain higher quality and efficiency by jointly developing and organizing project-related deliverables using a central document repository with version and editing control.

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A powerful tool or solution such as EPM needs to be customized to your business processes through configurations such as templates, outline codes and dashboard creation. Whereas traditional enterprise solutions have historically required months of design followed by an expensive implementation program, the design and implementation of the Microsoft Office EPM Solution can be done in a few weeks. Thereafter, any required changes after the rollout can be easily incorporated in a matter of hours.

WGA’s overall approach emphasizes training, process improvement and EPM tool adoption. It is our specific experience that all three need to be addressed in a particular manner because project management processes must be verified, developed and mapped to the software tool. Lack of adherence to this methodology adds significant risk of not reaching the expected from the tool implementation. In detail, the three areas of focus are described below:

1. People - Develop and deliver training to certify knowledge and skills conducive to the processes established around EPM and project management standardization.
   
2. Processes - Create and implement a consistent set of project management processes which will allow the client’s personnel to effectively plan and track Job Orders.
   
3. Tools – Select and implement software tools to support the organization in the achievement of its stated goals.
   

William George Associates (WGA) has the ability and expertise to cost effectively and quickly design and successfully implement a Microsoft Office EPM solution for your organization. Our experienced Consultants will also train your staff – from executives to project team members- on how to effortlessly use the EPM solution for their respective needs.

WGA Consultants:

1. Possess extensive Project Management expertise based on their own real life corporate experience, and have the tools, knowledge and techniques to adapt EPM to your processes. They specifically:
   1. Know business processes and how to map EPM to meet your needs.
   2. Understand and help create the required relationships within a corporation to make the use of EPM successful.
   3. Have a thorough knowledge of the technology.
2. Understand business objectives and problems to solve in various industries and functions, including:
   1. High Tech
   2. Semiconductor
   3. Construction
   4. Financial
   5. Manufacturing
   6. Software
   7. Information Technology.
3. Help clients overcome the typical problems of rolling out EPM at the organization or enterprise level by working as part of your team.
4. Have extensive experience in training and coaching at all levels of an organization and will help develop EPM champions within your organization.
5. Embrace the quality of the EPM rollout as the true measure of success.

A WGA implementation of the Microsoft Office EPM Solution is sensitive to the many challenges faced in successfully implementing projects. We recognize these challenges and create solutions that satisfy your needs.

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WGA will design and rollout your Microsoft Office EPM solution in a matter of a few short weeks. We then provide an on-going, “post rollout” quality assessment of your technical and functional implementation to ensure objectives are being met. During this “post rollout” period we provide consultation, coaching and on-going support.

We carry out the EPM design, rollout and post-rollout support in the following stages:

1. Scoping and requirements gathering: We will meet with various members of your organization to identify business objectives, business processes, particular problems to solve, tolerance for change and risk assessment, and organizational capabilities.
2. System design: Base on the company’s needs, WGA will identify hardware and software requirements, system configuration and settings, create custom templates, and required documentation.
3. EPM solution installation and testing: Install and configure the system, set enterprise features – codes, settings and views, create resource pool and enterprise projects.
4. Conduct staff training: Provide training to all participants and stakeholders – team members, project managers, resource managers, and administrators. In addition, provide one-on-one training to key executives.
5. “Post-rollout” support and quality assurance: Provide quality assurance assessment, consultation, coaching and on-going support to ensure that the solution is performing as originally designed and that business objectives are being met.

If you would like to speak with a WGA EPM Consultant about arranging an on-site Live Demo of the EPM product or would like to set up an appointment to discuss EPM further, please call 978.352.2163 or you can e-mail info@williamgeorge.net