The company’s management decided to dedicate one full day each month to reviewing the implementation of strategic projects. As a result, every management team member had a full-day event called the Strategic Project’s Review scheduled in their calendar every month.
The management required the PMO Director to prepare a PowerPoint presentation for each monthly project review, where the status of each project was described on two slides, following a standardized format developed in advance. And here is where the first challenges for the PMO Director began. To create this PowerPoint presentation for the management, the PMO Director attempted to meet with each project manager beforehand to discuss the project’s status and then update the two status slides accordingly. A significant problem was scheduling these meetings. Often, project managers could not find the time to meet, and even when a meeting was scheduled, it was frequently rescheduled multiple times because “something else took priority.” As a result, there were situations where, during the Strategic Project’s Review, the management expressed dissatisfaction with the PMO’s work—despite the PMO putting in significant effort to prepare everything before the meeting. I believe similar situations may occur in many organizations.
When we decided to develop the FlexiProject project and portfolio management software, our strategic goal was to create a tool that would significantly facilitate the PMO’s work in reporting the company’s project status—specifically, project statuses for the management team. To achieve this, we introduced the functionality of automated project reviews.
Before describing in detail how automated project reviews work, I want to emphasize that they have proven highly effective in practice. Some large companies that have been using FlexiProject for a while (both in production industries and financial institutions) have integrated automated project reviews into their project status reporting mechanisms for management. This means that when a project manager or PMO reports a project’s status to the project sponsor, the steering committee, or the company’s management, they are required to do so using FlexiProject’s automated reviews.
When all project managers report their readiness for review, both the PMO and the board can display all project statuses along with the project managers’ comments on a single page.
Project managers’ comments are reported directly to the board and other stakeholders. If there are too many projects on this dashboard and it’s difficult to navigate the list, for example, the CEO can filter only those projects that have an average or poor condition and focus on problematic projects where a response and decision from a board member are needed.
What is useful in organizations is the ability to review historical One Pagers and, for instance, see what the project manager said about their project three or six months ago.
Automated Project Reviews significantly improve the comfort and effectiveness of the PMO’s work, as well as clearly provide the board with information about the company’s project situation.