Measuring Return on Investment
The aim of Sciforma Corporation is to make our customers more competitive and to help them obtain the very best results from their projects. Sciforma Corporation is publishing a summary of a survey undertaken with those of its customers who are PS users.
From this 2007 survey, the 6 most often stated criteria were:
- 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
- Optimization of forecast workloads
- Knowing the true usage level of resources
From the 2007 survey, 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
- Standardization 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 assignments before assigning named individuals
- Distribute reliable schedules
- See and resolve conflicts between projects
- Carry out simulations or "what-if" scenarios
