One of the key challenges in delivering capital projects’ portfolio is the uniqueness that each project could have. Within the same organization, a capital project could be unique from other capital projects in terms of its scope of work, budget, milestone dates, parties involved and their obligations and entitlements, procurement strategy, risks, issues, market conditions, location among many others. This uniqueness means that decisions that need to be made during the delivery of those projects are to certain extent unique and depends on the completeness, quality, trust-worthiness and speed of information available when the decision has to be made.
Therefore, ensuring that decision makers have access to complete, quality, trust-worthiness and speed information is not an option if they need to have faster insights to make better informed decisions on their capital projects’ portfolio. Unlike Information Technology or other type of non-capital projects, the information that decision makers need to have access to far exceed schedule, resources, budget, deliverables, risks and issues that are usually updated on weekly and sometimes on monthly basis by few project team members, the information captured on capital projects is massive and includes also information that relates to pre and post contract management, site administration, quality assurance and control, health and safety, environment, claims and disputes among many others. This information will be provided by the different entities who have been contracted by the project owner to deliver the different components of the project scope of work.
In addition, individuals from the different entities who are responsible for providing the information could be located at different projects’ locations, within the same country as well as other countries, or the organizations’ premise. Performing work from distant locations has also become an increased requirement because of the Covid-19 pandemic for which it will continue to be an acceptable business practice. Further, this information should follow strict rules when it comes to submit, review and approve before it can be used by decision makers.
To address the challenge to have complete, quality, trust-worthiness and speed information on capital projects’ delivery, organizations need to have an enterprise-wide Project Management Information System (PMIS) like PMWeb to capture all needed information. This will eliminate the need for the time-consuming and lengthy process to extract, load, transfer, verify, validate and integrate the captured projects’ information which is usually stored at different projects’ locations among others. For many, the elimination of this process is considered as a lean management practice as it eliminates the wasted time and effort
PMWeb provides the different entities and their projects’ assigned individuals with a web-enabled secured access to allow them to provide the needed information anytime, anywhere using any device. PMWeb is flexible enough to allow creating all needed processes including the required input form to capture the information, workflow to establish the sequence for providing the information and supportive document files for the provided information. In addition, PMWeb is available as an on-premise hosted solution, in addition to SaaS subscription model, to address data security and protection requirements for project owners.
This captured information will become the basis for providing a single version of the truth for each project’s performance to provide a faster insight to enable project stakeholders to make better informed decisions. The same captured information will be also the basis for projects’ portfolio and program dashboards as well as any other report that could be needed by the stakeholders to provide the needed real-time insight.
About the Author
Bassam Samman, PMP, PSP, EVP, GPM is a Senior Project Management Consultant with more than 35-year service record providing project management and controls services to over 100 projects with a total value in excess of US $5 Billion. Those projects included Engineering and Construction, Oil and Gas Plants and Refineries, Telecommunication and Information Technology projects. He is thoroughly experienced in complete project management including project management control systems, computerized project control software, claims analysis/prevention, risk analysis/management (contingency planning), design, supervision, training and business development.
Bassam is a frequent speaker in topics relating to Project Management, Strategic Project Management and Project Management Personal Skills. Over the past 35 years he has lectured at more than 350 events at different locations in the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and South America. He has written more than 250 articles on project management and project management information systems that were featured in international and regional magazines and newspapers. He is a co-founder of the Project Management Institute- Arabian Gulf Chapter (PMI-AGC) and has served on its board of directors for more than 6 years. He is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) from the Project Management Institute (PMI), a certified Planning and Scheduling Professional (PSP) and Earned Value Professional (EVP) from the American Association of Cost Engineers (AACE) and Green Project Management (GPM).
Bassam holds a Masters in Engineering Administration (Construction Management), (1982) with Faculty Commendation, GWU, Washington, D.C., USA, Bachelor in Civil Engineering (1980) – Kuwait University, Kuwait and has attended a number of executive management programs at Harvard Business School, Boston, USA and London Business School, London, UK.