Project and Budget Management
A centralized process to improve decision-making and cost-control
Project management has long been a key IT management function-and one that requires disciplined effort to ensure a consistent approach from project to project. To accomplish effective project management, IT managers need the ability to continuously monitor projects, ensuring delivery is on time and on budget, and that what is delivered meets the needs of the business.
Experienced project managers know that without automation, their time will be absorbed in administrative work to gather, collate and analyze data from disparate reporting systems or no system at all. This is not only very time-consuming, but it puts the IT manager perpetually behind the curve: management-level reports take so long to generate that they are already out of date. Automating the process of project and budget management not only overcomes this familiar hurdle, it helps corporate IT departments create best practices.
With Compuware Changepoint, you get project management capability that can accommodate needs ranging from quick project creation to highly detailed cost tracking and budgeting. Changepoint improves visibility into project progress, and flags any deviations from plan, so you can be proactive instead of reactive. It supports creation of project plans, assign task distribution (workflow), staff scheduling and status monitoring.
Powerful and flexible project management
Changepoint provides powerful and flexible project management capabilities, including the ability to create and manage budgets for individuals or groups of projects. This functionality allows you to align resources, both human and monetary, with business objectives, and track the progress of each project in terms of costs, schedule and client satisfaction. Changepoint's project and budget management functionality also allows the creation of budgets for individuals or groups of projects, with forecasts and tracking of actual costs including time, expenses, products and fixed-fee items. It allows departments to cross-charge for services throughout the projects life cycle and address project changes that will affect the cost when clients request changes to the original project plan.
Key functionality for IT project success
Changepoint supplies key functionality that project managers need to keep control of the areas critical to the success of a complex IT project:
- plan projects by fiscal periods or days
- project template management and best-practice sharing
- project scheduling and graphical status reporting
- complete budget management to track cost, effort (of IT resources), change requests (as required by client) and contingency planning
- built in processes for organizing who (what business unit) has invested in what projects
- integrated and automated survey capabilities to track client satisfaction with each project
- issue and change management and ongoing risk assessment.
Within the Project Management portal, active project status and identification of problem areas are provided in real-time. Project scheduling and graphical status reports, can be provided within the portal giving visibility into the information you require. Changepoint also provides bi-directional Microsoft Project Integration.
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