Measuring return on investment

The aim of Sciforma (formerly PSNext) is to make our customers more competitive and to help them obtain the very best results from their projects. Sciforma is publishing a summary of a survey undertaken with those of its customers who are PS users.

From this 2011 survey, the 6 most often stated criteria were:

ROI
  • Portfolio management and being able to choose the "right" projects to launch (depending on risk/strategy/cost, etc.)
  • Ability to commit to projects, by knowing the "capacity to perform"
  • Having a standard level of reporting across projects
  • Avoiding double, or even triple, entry of data
  • Optimisation of forecast workloads
  • Knowing the true usage level of resources

Other criteria mentioned were :

Knowing

  • Which projects each member of staff is working on
  • Timescales and costs for each project
  • Time spent on unplanned tasks
  • Each project's progress
  • Variance between forecasts and actuals
  • Extra effort that may have been required

Improving

  • Adherence to timescales and costs
  • The transversal view of project and non-project work (e.g. maintenance)
  • Project preparation by using project templates
  • Standardisation of working methods in project tracking
  • Project consolidation to anticipate issues and make decisions
  • The use of previous project experience

Being able to

  • Anticipate the right time to recruit or sub-contract
  • Take into account priorities between projects
  • Simultaneously manage projects using shared resources
  • Be alerted to slippage
  • Use soft assignment before assigning named individuals
  • Distribute reliable schedules
  • See and decide upon conflicts between projects
  • Carry out simulations