Product Overview
A Breakthrough for the Project Management Office
As anyone who has ever been involved in setting up a project or program office can tell you, it is one thing to talk about getting good project
information, and entirely another to actually do it. Project Observatory is perhaps the first system that really addresses the problem of
creating, collecting, organizing and visualizing both project status and resource requirements across a large organization. And it does
it in a way that minimizes the impact on your most important people, your project leaders and managers.
A System That Delivers What Management Wants To Know
We started by talking with PMO managers to build up a "short list" of what they really wanted to know about each project.
When we did this, we found that the information they wanted was inherently simple - a few dates, an understanding of important issues,
and a realistic resource requirements extending out for the next few weeks or months (depending upon the
project). Nowhere did we
find anyone who really wanted a 1000 task project plan as a weekly report! Instead, we found a clearly expressed need to keep things
simple and convenient for the project leaders so that management could learn what it needed to know without creating new burdens for the people who
did the front line work. They wanted a project management system that could be used from both Notes and a Web browser.
To build this system, we started by defining a new business process we call Project
Telemetry (tm).
In this process, your project leaders act as reporters to an
automated project newsroom that organizes and summarizes data for management.
We then created a common format for communicating project level information that would be equally
appropriate for both small and large projects. This became known as the "Project Abstract" and has been implemented using the
public XML (eXtensible Markup Language) standard.
Next we defined a set of tools that enable Project Leaders to create project abstracts with minimal effort.
These tools range from fully automated agents that collect information from Project Gateway repositories
to simple "fill-in-the-blanks" reporting forms. The whole focus is to make reporting very easy for project leaders.
Using these tools even small projects that have no formal plans can be brought into the system with only a few minutes of work.
In the Project Observatory System, project abstracts are emailed to the observatory database. Using email allows you to collect reports
from all parts of your enterprise and from field assignments with no additional infrastructure.
At the center of this information flow is a unique database, called the Observatory
Center. The Observatory Center organizes,
tabulates, analyzes, and summarizes information for your management community.
The Observatory Supports Your Management Community
Most Program Managers are swamped with raw information. To be effective, they need consolidated pictures
of program status and organizational workload. Basically, they need to know where the problems are without searching.
Reports- To support these requirements, the observatory combines project status information into Program Reports and project resource
requirements into Organization Reports. You define the logical management reporting structure of the observatory.
You don't need to train hundreds of people to use a new naming convention, rather, the observatory takes the reports
as provided by the project leaders and organizes them into a structure that is useful to you.
Dashboards- These various reports (which can number in the thousands) are organized in dashboard views. Dashboards provide color coded indicators
that show you where project dates, costs and organization resource requirements exceed targets.
Visualization- Augmenting the words of each report is the Observatory
Explorer (tm).
This Java-based tool displays a great variety of bar, line, and pie charts to give you a visual situation analysis.
Other tools create Project and Program History Diagrams, Portfolio Analysis Charts, Geographic maps of resource availability,
and Workload Animations.
Briefings- A briefing is a walk-though style of information delivery that is particularly well suited to a management audience. Briefings are graphic slide show presentations that are generated on request. The user of the briefing simply presses a "Next" button to step through the presentation in the prepared sequence, or can select pages in any order.
To learn more about this unique facility... CLICK HERE
Where History holds the key to understanding
One of the unique benefits of the observatory system is that it provides a
historical framework for understanding trends.
The system automatically maintains historical records and displays trends of interesting project parameters (such as effort
of completion)
in tabular and graphical formats. Ready access to the trends of project status and resource demand gives the
program executive a much better basis for decision making than any single report could provide.
Forecasts- Another automated process, called Forecasting, uses the trend records to identify potential problems before
they become serious. Managers are notified by email when new forecasts are issued concerning their areas of
responsibility.
The Capacity to Handle the Largest Enterprises
The observatory system can scale to meet the needs of very large global organizations. This
scalability comes
from several sources. One source is the compact nature of the observatory data made possible by the project
abstracting process, another is the ability to organize reports into arbitrary grouping without depending upon
project managers and others "getting all the names right" (a virtually impossible task), and finally we benefit
from the very wide range of high performance hardware supported by Notes.
With An Open, Extensible, Web-Enabled Design
The Project Observatory System's open design allows customer modification and integration with existing
systems. All of the source code of the forms, views and agents is provided with the system at no extra cost.
Marin Research supports customers to help them integrate it with their existing applications.
You no longer have to choose between making a program information system from scratch or buying one that is not quite right;
You can install and use Project Observatory today, get results to management
today and customize it as time and resources permit.
