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PMControl™ Process
 

Jefferson's PMControl Process has many components that are integrated and disciplined to complement and complete the seven steps. In addition, the components are designed to integrate the sponsor’s needs and objectives.  A Jefferson core competency, organizational communication is an integral part of all components. The components are:

Time Tracking - The PMControl™ Time Tracking technique transcends beyond the one-dimensional timesheet to a complete, yet simple, team information capture. It was designed with a number of innovative timesaving features, combining activity time tracking with the capture of forecast information. Each assignment can therefore include actual time, estimate to complete and percent complete. Assignments can also be constrained by including a forecast start and finish date.

Team members can also create steps to break down the task into more manageable pieces. They can break down the required effort for each step and report at that level of granularity. This provides the team member with his/her own "To Do" list for each project assignment. Each step can also include actual time, estimate to complete and percent complete.

Project Accounting - The PMControl™ Project Accounting technique provides project managers with the ability to estimate capital costs and consumable budgets and time-phase them across the life of the project. Because this ability is actually integrated into our portfolio management solution, the organization benefits from a single source of expense related project performance information.

To facilitate the capture and tracking of incurred and/or committed expenses, PMControl™ enables project participants to enter expense information against appropriate accounting charge codes. By centralizing project expense reporting, cost variances are calculated, effectively reducing potential project risk and contingency utilization.

As project participants incur expenses, PMControl™ calculates the remaining expense budget for each charge code and provides the associated budget variance. This functionality enables an immediate response capability to mitigate variance impact and to realign project forecasts.

Issue, Change and Risk - The PMControl™ issue, change and risk techniques provide a standard simplified exception language to ensure that all team members participate in change control, risk and issue management. Exceptions are centralized to ensure that all unplanned events are identified and logged.

The PMControl™ Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) serves as a valuable tracking framework, aggregating all variances and exceptions to help project managers effectively identify and react to unplanned events, alleviating their burden of information capture and redefining their focus towards more value-added effort in variance and exception management.

Managers can use a standard process to review and approve work packages resulting from exceptions and ultimately transfer them into the WBS from where all work is centralized, distributed and controlled. In addition, this capability augments communication with the PMO and Implementation Consultant Project Management and other vendors completing the various assigned Task Orders.

Project Document Management - PMControl™ provides document lifecycle management, including document creation, review and approvals. At any level in the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), project managers and team members can create document folders and various document types as required. Folders may be nested within folders and documents may be positioned as sub-documents, creating a "document hierarchy structure".

This structure provides a logical, visual and intuitive document association environment, making it easy to locate and retrieve pertinent information. All documents can be attached at any level in the WBS, and will aggregate to the associated project element and can be instantly viewed. Task Order project documentation is available to the PMO, Implementation Consultant Project Managers and other vendors integrating with the Jefferson project team.

Project Collaboration - Using its integrated collaborative workflow technique, PMControl™ manages and tracks the flow of all project work. Projects processes are configured and automated into a fluid knowledge-enabled work stream that is ubiquitously present and accessible throughout the project lifecycle.

The PMControl™ provides a structured and traceable communication process from request to closing. All the latest information required for reaching an informed decision accompanies each communication, providing a reference library to support a formal workflow response by the recipient.

We can incorporate the desired flow cycles, gates, typical phase reviews and approvals that align with requirements. We can configure multiple outcome streams for each cycle with infinite branching alternatives. Each process can be accompanied by a checklist of activities to be performed by the manager prior to continuing to the next cycle. In addition, this component can augment communication with the PMO and Implementation Consultant Project Management and other vendors completing the various assigned Task Orders.

Reusable Methods - By developing standard reusable lifecycle templates and work products, job experts can provide managers with a shared plan of action, constraints, links to important information, expected results and standards of acceptability. Just as the software industry has reached an unprecedented level of efficiency primarily due to the introduction of reusable objects, similarly, project plans and engagement models assembled from high quality, robust, reusable and interoperable work-products, will play a defining role in the competitiveness of a project-based business. Jefferson has spent considerable time with the Software Engineering Institute’s several Capability Maturity Models (CMM) to integrate its model into PMControl’s reusable project capability.

PMControl™ incorporates a framework for asset-based planning. Managers can publish various methods. These published methods assist practitioners with better work sequences and provide them with sample scope and quality parameters.

Practitioners can also include skill alignments through the assignment of resource placeholders called "profiles". Templates include effort estimates, risk mitigations, and all necessary documents to help practitioners create more consistent, higher quality plans and avoid reinventing the wheel.

Project Control - PMControl™ provides project managers and team members with the ability to create dependencies between assigned tasks. If a team member inserts a predecessor dependency and the dates of that predecessor task are modified, managers will send an e-mail notification of each change to the task successor and the project manager.

Program managers can also consolidate their CPM and/or task driven schedules for multiple project resource scheduling and leveling. In a matrix organization that shares common resource pools, task inter-dependencies amongst projects are common. Often, a scheduled task lagging in one project will affect another.

PMControl™ enables program managers to create task dependencies across multiple projects. Once these dependencies have been established, program managers can then export the tasks back to their scheduler to be consolidated into a Master Project. Upon consolidation and re-leveling of the data, PMControl™ allows managers to republish the data back to individual projects. This capability augments communication with the PMO and Implementation Consultant Project Management and other vendors completing the various assigned Task Orders.

Resource Leveling / Scheduling - This capability schedules resources in a fashion with legacy desktop schedulers. It analyzes bottlenecks, available slack, over allocated resources and due date constraints in an iterative process that finds the best solution available across a multi-project environment. PMControl’s Resource Scheduling solution consistently returns shorter and more accurate schedules than most primary project management methodologies.

PMControl™ uses Microsoft® Project 2000 and 2002, adding support for Microsoft’s multi-project environment.

Capacity and Resource Planning - PMControl™ maintains a complete model of an organization's capacity, affected resources, skills inventory, total workload and resource demand. Its capacity and resource planning optimizes skill usage and ensures that all mission-critical resources are productively aligned with high priority projects.

With complete and accurate enterprise resource system availability, managers can plan initiatives that consider all organizational resource constraints and portfolio priorities. Beginning with an intuitive and flexible work breakdown structure, managers can identify familiar elements such as projects, deliverables, tasks and milestones, and plan initiatives that reflect realistic resource capabilities and assignment durations.

Project Status-at-a-Glance - PMControl™ structures an environment in which all resources are tasked from within a central prioritized system. No other assignments can be considered. This enables a dynamic decision process, whereby a list of new projects can be evaluated, selected and prioritized. Active projects can be continuously updated and revised and may be accelerated, rescued, killed or de-prioritized.

Resources are constantly reallocated to all remaining initiatives, aligning project and organizational priorities with business strategies and needs.

Since the Portfolio Status-at-a-Glance was not integrated from an external application but rather designed as part of an entire solution, managers and executives can leverage the complete repository of information to configure and personalize their views, columns and bands.
 
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