Programme and Project Management

According to research by the Standish Group, 23% of all projects are cancelled before completion or are never implemented, 63% experience schedule delays and 45% experience cost overruns. This is despite the widespread use of conventional project management tools.

Overall, nearly half of all projects are deemed to have delivered significantly outside their original parameters, meaning that the project was over budget, exceeded the time estimate or delivered fewer features than initially specified.

Project Office

Many companies seek to improve performance through the use of effective project management techniques. Of these, the concept of a Project Office is becoming widely used as business issues and limited resources increase the pressure to achieve a measurable return on investment.

The Project Office records, measures, evaluates and enforces the implementation of IT project processes across a company's business units. In order to achieve these objectives, the Project Office must process large amounts of data quickly and efficiently.

PAT Solution for the Project Office

The PAT Programme and Project Management application is designed to provide an out-of-the-box Project Office support solution that can be tailored to any organisations specific requirements and processes.

PAT provides a flexible structure to support Programme and Project Managers, and the Project Office, in the day-to-day management of their work. This application supports the standard work-breakdown structure, and data may either be entered manually or imported from MS Project©. In addition, the application supports actions, issues, risks, assumptions, change requests, off-specifications and budget data as well as all related project documents.



PAT supports a wide variety of standard Programme or Project Office functions as described below:

• PAT allows users to establish and deploy a common set of project management processes and templates, saving project managers from having to develop their own and ensuring that projects start up more quickly and with much less effort.
  
  
• PAT can record data at any point in the project hierarchy. Each item may be viewed in its 'native' context and also in all higher contexts. For instance, risks entered against a task may also be viewed at the project and programme levels. It is possible to add some risks against tasks and some directly against the project or programme. At each level PAT can either show only native risks or a consolidated view of all risks in the tree.
  
  
• PAT allows users to build their methodology and update it as needed to account for improvements and best practices. As new or revised processes and templates become available, they are deployed them consistently to the organisation.
  
  
• PAT facilitates improved team communications by ensuring common processes, deliverables and terminology. This results in less misunderstanding and confusion within the organisation as everyone uses the same language and terminology for project related work.
  
  
• Project data may be viewed and filtered in multiple different formats. PAT allows records to be viewed as lists, graphs, grids, dashboards, diaries, SASCO© planners, Gantt charts and trees. Specialised data may be viewed as scorecards, s-curves and timesheet views. Any list may be dynamically reconfigured to display, for instance, the data as a graph or a grid.
  
  
• PAT supports a common repository for all types of project data. This allows current projects to be managed more effectively and provides a metrics base for future projects.
  
  
• PAT records and tracks basic information on the current status of all projects in the organisation and provides project visibility to management in a common and consistent manager.
  
  
• PAT can record the details of any type of data that you may wish to track and allows you to customise data structures to meet the specific requirements or standards of your organisation. Each record (say a Risk) will be tracked by PAT in the context of its creator, its current owner and against its parent at the time of creation (task, project or programme). Each record may be put through workflow, escalated, have comments and notes added and emails and documents registered against it. At any time, the item can be tracked and located either in one of its native contexts or by using one of PAT's various powerful search functions.
  
  
• PAT maintains organisation-wide metrics on the state of project management, project delivery and the value being provided to the business.
  
  
• PAT records all changes at key stroke level in a standard audit file. Any field may be flagged as 'history capable' and when such a field is changed, the system will not only record the change but also ask for a reason, effectively building up a diary for every data record.
  
  
• PAT provides users with the capability to ‘glue’ disparate data sources together for increased leverage and effective management.
  
  
• As the PAT data structure is completely flexible, it is possible to record data against projects that might not normally be seen as part of the standard project management cycle. PAT is fully capable of acting as a meeting management system, a defect tracking system, a test management system or a requirements tracking system.