Project Management Tools for Executives

Question: What are some key features to look for in a project management tool to help Executives made strategic decisions?

Answer:  Data integrity is the building block for strategic decision making. If data on a project or portfolio is not accurate or up to date, the value of the decision will suffer. Executives will be more likely to make the wrong call since the information they’re relying on is wrong. When looking at project management software, its therefore critical to make sure that it gathers and generates accurate and up to date information on projects or portfolios. 

Further, the data collected should be useful for strategic decision making. Executives require a larger scale picture so they can identify and guage the performance of longer term trends in the business. An executive is often matching the success of current operations against a set of longer-term strategic goals.  Having aggregate data on projects, portfolios, budgets and resources makes it possible for them to see if the ship is heading in the right direction, as it were, and how to best direct money and people to keep it on course.

Third, the data should be presented in a relevant and meaningful way.  Different people respond better to data presented in different ways. Some executives can pull usefull information from tables and text.  Others prefer graphs and charts.  However an executive prefers their information, it is important the format provides a clear picture and is not overly cluttered with data for data’s sake. At some point, aggregrate data can lose its relevance or utility by being too multidimensional, include too many items, or try to paint too broad a picture. 

An effective project management tool for executives will strike a careful balance between the breadth of a single report  and the easy accessibility and range of reports that can show other aspects of the business -without cramming too much on a page.

Vertabase Pro is built with these concepts in mind.

          

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 19th, 2007 at 4:57 pm and is filed under Project Management Software, Software and Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.