Ensure projects are delivered on time and to budget
For many organisations, one of the key drivers for implementing a time & expense management solution is to aid the project management process. To do this a system must provide the basics; capture time, expenses, cost and revenue. In addition, many time and expense management applications also provide features specifically targeted at improving the project management process. For organisations with a project focus, we recommend that your selection criteria include the ability to manage project budgets and the ability to track project progress.
Project Budget Tracking
In order to deliver a project to budget, a mechanism needs to exist where actuals can be tracked against budget. Advanced time and expense solutions such as Atlantic Global include the ability to create project budgets. Budgets can be generated directly from project plans or broken down into specific roles, activities and date ranges. A simple budget management facility will help you control budget creep by providing your project managers with a real time assessment of budgets vs. actuals. To aid analysis, budgets can be broken down into time, cost, charge and expenditure elements.
Project Progress Tracking
An essential element to delivering projects on time and to budget is a mechanism to provide project managers with feedback on the progress of their project. A simple method of achieving this is to track time at task or assignment level and provide an estimate to complete. Such data can be used by project managers to review the progress of each task and its potential impact on the project time line and budget. Critical to the success of this functionality is ease of use and integration with your project planning tool. To make recording time against tasks easy for the end user the solution should allow this to be an optional setting at a project level. Also, features should exist to limit the options presented to the end user, such as only user assigned tasks, a rolling window of tasks or only incomplete tasks. Integration with your project planning tool will allow the project manager to make changes to the project timeline based on the feedback from end users. Applications such as Atlantic Global OnDemand, have fully integrated project planning functionality and dedicated project review interfaces where the project manager can analyse actuals vs. planned vs. % complete for each individual task assignment. This provides the project manager with a highly accurate real time picture of project progress.
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