The IPM Blog

On a project, documents can be approved, changed, updated and reapproved all the time, often being sent back and forth between multiple people working on a Job. It’s no wonder then that it’s easy to lose track of where a document is at, and who is holding up its progress.

That’s why we’ve added a cool and exciting new feature to all the project documents in IPM. It’s called routing, or otherwise referred to as ‘ball in court’. Now every document in our project management software has a grid where you can add details of each of the people responsible for the document, and at what stage of the process they are responsible for it.

Then, through the power of Microsoft Dynamics workflows, you can set up a whole range of processes that automatically update the routing as the document moves from one stage to the other. This way you can see who’s court the ball is in at any given time – and more importantly, who is holding the process up.

But we’ve not only included the routing feature on the individual document forms – there is also an overall routing view where you can see all the outstanding balls in court for your project. And with the customisability of Microsoft CRM, you can change the view to see whatever you like, including outstanding balls in court, balls in court for one particular user or balls in court for a single spec. section or trade. What’s more, CRM’s conditional formatting also lets you highlight the list in whichever way works for you – we’ve found it works really well to highlight all the overdue balls in court in bold red, so you can see at a glance what needs actioning quickly. You can also choose to view the routing information as part of a dashboard that appears when you first log in.

As you can see from the options above, the combinations of how you can use this new functionality are endless; it’s all down to how you want to customise the workflows, the view, the conditional formatting and your dashboard. You can tweak it so that it best suits the way you manage your projects, and it means you will always know who’s court the ball is in on all your projects.

For more information on this new feature, or to see a demo of it in action, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Managing projects can often be a very demanding task, one that requires skill, dedication and a very cool head. But there are also a few tips and tricks you can implement to ensure your projects run smoothly.

1. Plan for everything
One of the best things I’ve heard when it comes to project management is that failing to plan is planning to fail. Bringing your projects in on time and on budget needs a great deal of planning, even before the very first foundations are laid. What’s more, you have to keep planning as you go along to ensure you always stay one step ahead. You need to continually monitor the schedule to anticipate which tasks need to be done next and what effect any notices of delay from subcontractors will have. It is also imperative to keep a comprehensive and updated issue and risk register so nothing catches you off guard. In other words, hope for the best but plan for the worst.

2. Keep track of communication
There’s nothing worse than having to trawl through six months worth of emails or project documents to answer an RFI, or misplacing a vital piece of communication in the event of a dispute or claim. That’s why good project managers keep track of all their project communication, no matter how small. It helps to have a central database that everyone on the project team has access to and can store all project documents and can keep a history of any edits or changes made to a document. Automatic email filing can also help, and IPM’s facility can file all incoming and outgoing emails against a transaction, rather than against the job.

3. Introduce a little automation
While sometimes computers and IT may feel frustrating, you have to admit technology really has made our lives a lot easier, particularly when it comes to project management. When done right, automation can be a project manager’s best friend; completing certain tasks so you don’t have to worry about them and ensuring all the right data is in all the right places. Using project management software is one of the best ways to bring automation to managing your projects. IPM’s project management software has features like customisable workflows you can use to convert change requests into change orders or subcontract change orders, automatically file your emails, automatically generate email reminders for meetings and track and store the information for RFIs and RFQs as it is emailed back and forth.

4. Keep all your team members on the same page
Managing a project is not just about juggling the schedule, subcontracts and budget, but also about managing the people you are working with. Many different people contribute to a project and in order to be able to manage everyone and ensure they all know what their job is, it’s important that everyone has access to the same, up-to-date information. You can make sure of this by using a central database that team member can access from anywhere, both online and offline. This means there are not multiple spreadsheets being emailed around and creating confusion as to which is the most up to date. Another simple way to keep everyone on the same page is to have standardised project reports across your whole organisation, meaning people are all familiar with the report design and know exactly where the content they are looking for is located in the report.

Are there any other fail safe ways you use to manage your projects? Have your say in the comments below :)

One of the things that can really unravel a project is a lack of communication between the people working on a particular job. Jobs can have literally hundreds of people working on them from project managers, the project team, architects, right down to all the various subcontractors and their own employees. Ensuring smooth communication between all these people can seem like a massive task, but it doesn’t have to be.

In order to ensure the project runs smoothly, it’s important to ensure the communication procedure is set right from the start. Nothing infuriates project teams more than being given the answer to an RFI days after it came in, working off old plans that have since been updated two or three times and not having the most up to date version of the schedule. Through these simple breakdowns in communication, time and money are wasted and staff confidence can slowly be eroded.

But there are also so many advances in technology these days that can assist project teams in maintaining open and effective channels of communication. For a start, software with a central database, where all employees log into the same system and can see the most up to date project documents is an incredibly valuable asset for a project team. Project team members then have no reason to not have the most up to date information.

But what about subcontractors who may not necessarily have access to the software? Well, there are also ways to ensure the good communication can extend to subcontractors and also right through to site level. Workflows can be set up to automatically send emails to alert relevant subcontractors that an updated plan has been added to the database, or a change has been made to the schedule. This way everyone stays in the loop and can work efficiently with the most up to date information.

If you would like a free demo of IPM, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

In the information age, nothing is more valuable than data. Data is one of those tricky, intangible assets that we can’t really put a monetary value on, but we know it’s precious. We have pins and code tokens to access our money, and it’s no different with data – passwords and logins protect virtually every company’s data set in the world today.

These days, you would be crazy to hide your money under your mattress. Well it’s the same with data. In an information rich world, it’s madness storing valuable project information on an individual person’s laptop, or (and I have seen this done, believe it or not) on an external portable hard drive.

Many smaller companies may feel they can’t afford to invest in specially designed software to store their project information safely and securely, but I think the question is whether you can afford not to. Although the protection of your information against loss or (in very extreme cases) theft is one major benefit of dedicated project management software, it’s not the only one with relation to security of information. There are a number of other benefits in having your information stored securely in one place:

Future opportunities and learning from previous experiences
Everything that happens on a project can teach you something for the next one. The mistakes that were made and the things that worked well all provide good guidelines for how to tackle future projects, and whilst the very next project may not necessarily benefit from any of this data, one five years down the track might. But what if the project manager who worked on the previous project stored all his data on his own personal laptop, which was wiped when he left and handed to another staff member? All that valuable data is lost.

Easy information access in the event of claims and disputes
No one likes it, but it’s a fact of life that in construction there will sometimes be disputes. The best way to tackle these is by constantly arming yourself with every possible piece of evidence that can back up your position – emails, contracts and records of phone conversations all make up a wealth of data that can back you up in the event of a dispute, a possibly end up saving you a lot of money. And it’s no use having all this data scattered between different people on the project team, or worse, in people’s memories.

Safety from tangible threats
With developments in cloud computing and storing your data on external servers, your project information is also continually backed up and safe from more tangible threats, such as physical damage to your offices and servers through natural disasters, or blackouts and server failure.

Project management software is a considerable investment and one that takes much research, evaluation and comparisons of different offerings to get right. So to help you choose the best software for your organisational needs, here are seven things to look for when making the all important decision of which project management software to go with:

1. Job Costing
The software should be able to handle your job costing needs, including giving you instant access to actual project costs and the ability to alert users to potential cost overruns before they send the project too far off budget. Good project management software will also be able to produce cost projections easily and regularly.

2. Document Control
One of the main advantages of project management software is that all your job information is stored in a central database accessible to everyone who is working on the project. Therefore, an easily accessible database with the ability to store all the information relating to the project is a must. Documents stored in the database must also be easily tracked and retrievable in the event of a dispute, claim or change of scope.

3. Reporting
Good project management software should come with built in comprehensive reporting facilities that can be easily customised to suit your organisation’s specific needs. Reports should be able to be generated quickly and easily with up to the minute information to give you the most accurate view of your project. A bonus is also the ability to report on all aspects of the project, not just document control but also costs as well.

4. Ability to Customise
With the nature of project management, no two organisation’s processes are the same and that’s why it’s important to be able to customise the software to suit your organisation. Small configurations to the software that do not need external consultants and are free for users to do themselves are so important when it comes to any kind of software. Customisable forms, field labels and dashboards all help make project management software easy to use and relevant to your users, as well as user-defined workflows to streamline and automate your processes.

5. Integration
In order to keep everyone in your organisation on the same page and reduce duplicate data entry, project management software should be able to integrate with your ERP system. Good project management software will have seamless integration with a number of ERP systems that allows smooth transfer of information between the two applications. Integration between other applications is also a plus, such as email integration with Outlook.

6. Web based/SaaS option
With advancements in cloud computing and hosting software online, many project management software applications are moving towards this new technology. Although it may not suit every organisation, good project management software provides the option to buy an online version of the software. This gives you the opportunity to assess which is the best option for your business needs and the ability to choose to use the software either on premise or online.

7. Scheduling
This may seem obvious, but some project management software applications do not provide the ability to schedule work on the project. Gantt charts are an easy way to see at a glance the project schedule, and if these are integrated with other areas of the software to automatically update should something change elsewhere on the project, it’s even better.

If you are in the market for a new project management software solution, feel free to contact us for a free demo of IPM and all of the above features.

I came across an article on the PMI’s Voices on Project Management site last week and it really struck a chord. In the post, Lynda Bourne highlights the importance of document layout in order to communicate your message effectively.

With the advent of smart phones, email and twitter, much of our communication has become instantaneous, short bursts of information. As this information is often only a few sentences, we give little thought to the layout, instead punching out a few lines here and there whenever a thought crosses our minds.

But with project documents that often contain complex information, intricate fine points and important details, getting the layout right is crucial to make sure the information isn’t lost or confusing for the reader. Clean lines, simple fonts and white space around logos make complex documents easier to read and project a very professional image to your stakeholders as well.

To make the process easier, many project management software applications, such as IPM, have built in report facilities that can generate a report with the same layout each and every time you need the information. This means you only need to worry about the information you put into the report, and the software will take care of all the fiddly layout bits to make sure your reports are clean, simple and easy to read.

What’s more, with everyone in your organisation using the same report template, you are all on the same page, and project a professional, united image to external stakeholders. IPM also allows you to customise parts of the report templates to suit your organisational requirements.

So although our communication has become very short and quick, in project management it still is important to pay attention to the smaller details of your communication with others, such as report layouts. If you would like to know anything more about IPM’s report facilities, please don’t hesitate to contact us or leave a message below.

We’re very pleased to announce the publication on the Microsoft website of our latest IPM case study. We’ve recently been working with one of our newer clients, Tracey Brunstrom and Hammond, to share with you their experience of IPM and how it has helped them provide independent project management services across Australia and Singapore.

The case study highlights TBH’s need to standardise documentation for all their offices across Australia and Singapore, and how IPM’s report functionality is helping them achieve this. We also look at the checks and balances inherent in IPM’s automatic email filing facility, and how IPM’s central database has enabled TBH supervisors to keep track of project progress without having to visit the local office.

The full TBH project management software case study can be found on the Microsoft website, and we hope it’s useful for you to see IPM in action in a real world project management scenario. If you have any further questions about this particular case, or how IPM may be able to help solve any of your project management problems, please don’t hesitate to contact us or leave a comment below.

We often encounter problems on a project, and sometimes even the best of project management practices isn’t able to avoid them. But we know there are also those other problems on a project that should never have arisen in the first place. Sometimes it comes down to the way the project is managed, and the skills and experience of the project manager, as to the kinds of problems you encounter, and whether they are the avoidable or non-avoidable type. But there are other times when problems can be avoided by simply using the right kind of project management tools for the job. So I thought I would illustrate 4 common project problems that are avoidable, or at least mitigated with the right project management software.

1. Budget blowouts
We’ve all encountered budget problems on projects before and it is inevitable that problems will arise that force the budget skywards. But there are also times when the budget is beginning to come unstuck, and the project manager isn’t even aware of it. It’s at these times that it’s crucial to know exactly where your budget and costs figures are at so you can begin to make immediate changes to get the budget back in the black. As I was once told, being in the red on a project is often manageable so long as you are aware of it, but being in the red and not knowing is where the real problem lies. Good project management software should be able to give you up to the minute accurate budget information.

2. Unexpected events that you really should have expected
How often have you heard someone one a project say ‘Well I didn’t expect that to happen’, yet it’s something that they really should have been aware of? Good project management software should have an issues log and risks register, as well as a user friendly interface to ensure everyone is accessing and contributing to the database. With project management software, you only get out what you put in, so you need a data rich central database in order to be able to expect and predict problems that may arise. If the solution is user friendly with a comprehensive issues log, more people with use it and contribute data so everyone stays on the same page and ‘unexpected’ issues don’t arise.

3. Schedule blowouts
All kinds of things can affect a project’s schedule, including (but of course not limited to!) weather delays, funding, change orders and defects. We know project management software isn’t good enough to control the weather, but it should be good enough to help you identify where your schedule is being affected and take immediate steps to minimize the impact, or alert other stakeholders of changes to the schedule. Gantt charts are one of the most effective ways to manage your schedule, and interactive Gantt charts that integrate with other areas of the software to provide accurate schedule information are a must.

4. Customer demands not within the original scope
Another headache encountered on projects is a customer demanding something that was not within the original scope of the project, but insisting that it was. Or worse yet, refusing to pay for it. This is when you need accurate records with detailed information about the project scope at your fingertips, as well as any emails or other records of communication between the two parties. Good project management software will have all the project information stored in a central database that everyone working on the project has been contributing to. And in the case of IPM, all email communication can be automatically filed under a unique tracking code for each transaction, so you not only have a comprehensive email log, but individual emails are also easy to locate.
 
Of course, project management software is not the answer to every problem on a project, but there are certainly some problems that can be countered with a combination of good project management, and the right kind of project management tools.

You can find out more about IPM Project Management Software by contacting us for a free demo, or posting a comment below.

Have you worked in an organisation where there has been no central database for everyone to manage a project from? Not having a central database has many implications for the way the project is managed, but one seemingly simple one that can drive employees nuts is that project managers often need to create their own report templates for each aspect of the project. And we know not everyone thinks the same way when it comes to templates.

There’s nothing more confusing when everyone working on a project has a different way of writing and formatting reports. RFIs produced by one project manager could look completely different to RFIs produced by another project manager a day later. Not only does this not provide cohesion amongst all your project documents, but it is also very frustrating for the person who has to read them and figure out what part of the report the information they need is contained in.

Having employees create their own document templates also means the organisation is sending out different looking reports to its external stakeholders, and this doesn’t really project a professional, unified image. It seems like a small detail in the scheme of multimillion dollar projects, but something as simple as a unified company image can really show others how professionally your team can manage those multimillion dollar projects.

So, in order to assist project managers so they don’t have to keep creating their own templates, and to provide everyone with simple, easy to understand reports, IPM has uniform reports across the whole application. When you generate a report from IPM, it will always be laid out and formatted the same way. This means each cost report, for example, whether it’s generated by the accountant or the PM will look the same. And not only that, all the reports across the program have a similar look and feel, with company logos and information that is common to two different types of reports appearing in the same place and the same layout. The reports are also easy to generate with a click of your mouse, so users will likely prefer them over creating their own separate templates.

Of course, with the proper security access level, organisations are free to customise the software, including their reports, to suit the way they want to present their data, rather than using the reports provided by IPM. And as any customisations made are applied organisation wide, all employees with always be generating and working off the same report templates, whether they are customised or not.

Having standardised reports across your entire organisation may seem like a simple feature, but many people find this a real positive with theIPM software. Not only can it make a difference to your organisation’s image, but also to the efficiency of employees’ work.  No longer will project managers have to create and produce their own report templates, and employees will also be able to process information in a familiar way each time they receive a new report.

As always, please feel free to contact us for a free demo if you’d like to know more about IPM.

This is the fourth post in the Workflow series, which we hope has been helpful so far in showing you a few examples of how workflows can help automate some key areas of IPM you use every day.

In this post I’m going to cover the beginning of the change management process, and the next few coming will show you additional workflows you can use to help make manage changes to the project a little easier.

Typically many changes to a contract or part of the project will result from the identification of a certain issue. IPM has a comprehensive Issues register where you can record and monitor details of all the issues that arise on a project. Sometimes though, it may also be necessary to take the issue further, and the use of workflows can greatly assist this.

This workflow is a simple one, but one that can save you time and means you don’t have to enter duplicate data. Once an Issue is added to the Issue you register, you may discuss it will others involved in the project, and you may then need to create an RFI to get more information or a Change Request if the issue needs to be addressed with a change to the original plans.

To avoid re-entering all the information in the issue record into IPM in order to create an RFI or a Change Request, you can simply set up a workflow to run on demand that can automatically create these documents for you, using the information from the Issue. Simply select which Issue you wish to address, and run the appropriate workflow to turn it into either an RFI or Change Request. Of course, you can also create workflows with slightly different processes, for example you can turn an issue into a meeting minute item so that it can be discussed before the decision is made to proceed.

We have more posts coming in the Workflow series that show you how workflows can help you manage Change Requests once they are in the system, so stay tuned...

Note: for simplicity, I refer only to Change Requests in this post, but please note these are referred to as Variation Requests in countries outside the USA.


Previous entries in the Workflow Series:
Creating Forecast Tracking Reports
Monitoring Meeting Minute Items
Making Purchase Order Approvals Simpler