Project Management Environment

Reed PS has considerable experience of project methodologies and management styles. It is our experience that one approach, above all others, gives a greater assurance of project success: collaborative working.

Many companies rely on their intranets, extranets, and the Internet as the architectures for collaborating, managing work, disseminating data, and making decisions. Effective project management requires a more focused, specialised solution.

Our web based Project Management Portal, DlivR, provides all project participants with access to project information. This includes role-based views of project health via graphics dashboards, as well as documentation which is supported with a level of Configuration Management that ensures that project team members can be confident that they are able to access up-to-date document-based information without having first to check if it is the latest version.

The need for project collaboration is not new and to an extent has been conducted in an informal, non-structured manner for many years through traditional means of communication. However, the past few years have seen new challenges emerging with regard to successful project management, and there is an increasing awareness that managed project collaboration is a vital key to project success.

There are several factors that Reed PS acknowledges as drivers of collaborative project working:

• With project lifecycles typically becoming shorter, there is less relevance in using traditional, detailed planning techniques, and expectations of shorter project turnarounds are much greater. Less detailed planning requires more emphasis on collaboration techniques for managing projects.
• A greater number of parties are now typically involved in different aspects of a project, often in different locations, and even working for different companies. Thus, the need to share information in an easily accessible manner is rapidly increasing.
• Many projects involve a large amount of repeatable work and the ability to build on previous project approaches and successes is often critical to the successful completion of the project in hand. Being able to model tasks and procedures on previously validated, successful work is important.
• Scheduling still plays an important role in modern projects. However, there is now an additional need to share information between different team members as well as being able to carry out more traditional project management tasks such as updating and controlling project status. Gone are the days when project management was solely the responsibility of the project manager or planner whose primary tool was a very specific project planning software package that required a high level of expertise and training.

In response to these changing needs, Reed PS has invested in its DlivR collaborative working environment. Through it, team members of differing roles have additional responsibility and involvement in the project management process; additionally, availability of information to disparate team members has increased. When combined, these provide much broader participation and project visibility, which in turn increases the chances of project success.

In today's business age, where time is of the essence, collaboration-based project management software needs to meet the demands of projects which require shorter turnaround times, and distributed team members who are not always working full-time on a particular project. Web-based tools enable team members to do this with ease.