The project game is quite a complex and risky one. Everything revolves around business processes, from approvals,to meeting follow-ups, risk management, change management (variation) control, the list goes on……. Typically, many of these processes are managed in one way or another, often externally via a spreadsheet, or an Outlook reminder, or quite frankly a piece of paper on the Project Manager’s desk. And of course because every business, in fact every job, can be different, why should the software author be the one to determine what path a process should follow?
Enter ….. the user defined Workflow Engine. Because IPM is a Microsoft Dynamics XRM solution, it automatically assumes functions that are native to this environment – one of these being the workflow engine. This is great news because what this means is that pretty much any business process can be defined electronically, and then triggered based on rules. E.g. when raising a variation it needs to be routed to the client for approval and these sorts of approvals can be complex or simple depending on the project. So there might be a simple one step approval or a more complex four or five step approval process. Another example could be as simple as an overdue meeting task – a task has been assigned to a project team member but if they haven’t completed this within a particular timeframe, I need the system to tell me and also send them an automatic reminder. Or maybe I have a high risk item on my Risks Register that I need something to happen on based on degree of risk.
These are all examples of workflows and as you will appreciate, each organisation will undoubtedly have different requirements, all nicely dealt with using the workflow engine inside IPM.