PROJECT PLANNING & COLLABORATION ENGINE

SOFTWARE AND PROCESSES FOR
HASSLE-FREE PROJECT PLANNING AND COLLABORATION

What is your challenge as you see it?

”I am not bashful about it. Today, across our organization, there is no consistency in the rigor of project planning. It is true that project managers differ in the way they manage projects, and it is also true that one project if very much different from the other, that each requires a different approach to project planning. When it comes to project planning, for every task, there are issues of what resources to use, at what cost and when. And it takes so much manual effort to aggregate and report on these aspects, across the enterprise.”

What solutions do you have today?

”Today, we have bought the project planning systems offered by the industry. They are no more than sophisticated spreadsheets to break down tasks into subtasks and their subtasks. You can do resource allocations, but not optimize on the spot. You can neither do multiple “what-if” scenarios for a single project, nor aggregate the expenses across projects automatically. It is difficult to marry the planning systems with resource availability data, and it is difficult to marry the planned spend with the financial planning systems either. In short, even after buying and installing an “industry-proven” project planning system at a huge cost and many months of customization, we still have to struggle to get the data that we want for aggregate planning.”

What exactly do you need and why is it different?

You need not just a system, but also one that blends into the processes and inculcates the discipline of individual project planning, with the ease and flexibility to adapt to different project types. You need a system that yields a resource availability picture simultaneously, and roll up the spending automatically. You want to solve the problem of individual project planning and aggregate planning at one shot, by integrating financial planning and resource planning at the same time. That would be a tremendous saving and relief to the organization as a whole, and not just the Senior Management.

What does GRIP-IT Planning & Collaboration Engine do? (What are its features?)

OpenMetrik planning and collaboration engine enables the project managers to start with the appropriate project template, while simultaneously developing the cost center resource availability and financial estimation models. It also facilitates “what-if” scenarios of make vs. buy situations and gives you the cost and resource impacts for ready comparison. OpenMetrik Project Planning and Collaboration engine has an enterprise visibility component that automatically externalizes all planning and actuals capture at and below the project level, to the enterprise.

Part of the Bigger Picture…

OpenMetrik Planning and Collaboration Engine is part of the overarching GRIP management framework.