Project Management & Controlling

A project normally goes through five phases. During these five phases, certain tasks must be performed from within project management to achieve the project goals. However, there are constraints that must be taken into account, such as budget, time, and the resources required. When carrying out project management and controlling, project managers often encounter internal problems that need to be solved quickly so as not to endanger the project goal. However, external factors, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic, can also lead to new problems that require an adjustment of the previous way of working.

Especially in today's world it is more important than ever to digitalize the work in project management and to make project management more effective and efficient in the cooperation with the team with the help of IT solutions.

But what can companies do to effectively support their project managers and project teams and minimize problems? Which digital solutions can help to eliminate problems that arise in the short term and over the long term? How can you contribute to efficient, cost-saving and future-oriented project management? 

We show the challenges and trends in project management and explain the advantages of using project management software.

54%

of German companies manage their projects with the help of digital solutions.

Problems in project management 

According to the definition in DIN 69 901, project management is the entirety of leadership tasks, leadership organization, leadership techniques and leadership resources for the execution of a project. Project management should therefore ensure that the agreed objectives are achieved within the set technical, scheduling, personnel and financial framework.

However, during the implementation of a project, both the project manager and the project team often reach their limits. The reasons for this can be many and varied. For example, if an employee does not know what added value his or her work brings, if the actual costs exceed the initially estimated costs by far, or if there is no regular communication between the team members, this can develop into a high level of dissatisfaction among employees and customers in the long run.

However, you can often solve the most common problems in project management with simple, digital solutions.

One of the most important factors for successful project management is team communication. Regular team meetings are therefore indispensable to keep everyone involved up to date. However, this is often at least not possible in person, as employees are increasingly working from their home office. This makes regular status updates and early planned meetings all the more important. Take into account the various media such as Skype conferences or team meetings. Check how you can best reach your employees and which tools can be used to communicate best between the team. Video chats, recording function and a directly integrated chat support your team in their collaboration. 

Money is often a scarce commodity. It is important to be able to give realistic cost estimates to potential customers as early as the sales activities. To improve cooperation between sales employees and project managers, you can use standard templates from IT solutions for joint processing of quotations. Another option is professional service automation, which gives you effective planning and management capabilities to build your projects efficiently and profitably. With online dashboards, you can develop scenarios at an early stage to help you stay within budget. Use digital automation to ensure that your project invoices are in line with contract terms and services rendered. You can also create automations for processing, approving and sending invoices and integrate the resulting billing directly with your accounting.

During project planning, the project plan for the entire project must be worked out. However, project teams often take far too little time for this important aspect of project management. As a result, the defined goals, milestones and resource planning are too imprecise, which leads to problems later on. With the help of digital planning tools and online dashboards, you can easily document all important information and make adjustments at any time. So take your time to define goals, plan the procurement of resources, create a detailed milestone plan including individual work packages described and assign responsible persons to them. Make a sound cost estimate and specify the project scope. You can use the digital planning module to manage your resource management, i.e. resource utilization, resource requirements calculation and identification of resource bottlenecks, particularly efficiently.

Often the creation of status reports is very time-consuming for the employees. The required information is only sporadically documented and not analyzed. Keep the effort for reporting low and only request the really important data. Extract as much information as possible from existing IT systems or digital project plans. In digital online and offline tools, you as project manager have unlimited access to all customer information, the order history and all current data. Furthermore, you can use data analysis functions to evaluate resource utilization and project key figures. With the help of interactive real-time dashboards, you are provided with sound key figures, analyses and meaningful visualisation functions.

In today's world, cooperation across locations is particularly prone to errors. Not seeing the team members regularly and sitting together in one office makes work more difficult and leads to longer reaction and processing times. Here it is particularly advisable to fall back on an effective, digital collaboration tool, such as SharePoint or Confluence. With the online and offline functions, the employees have the possibility to work productively on the road and access the system from anywhere. They can record working hours and travel expenses, update schedules or participate in online meetings at any time.

Project controlling describes the activities that are necessary to control a project over its entire duration. Poor or even missing project controlling leads to intransparency towards stakeholders and to an increased risk of not achieving the project goals. With the help of online controlling boards, which the project team can access remotely at any time, the key performance indicators of a project can be viewed and analyzed. The objectives can be viewed, planned work packages can be entered and the necessary data for a target-performance comparison can be recorded. In order to analyse deviations of the forecast data, IT solutions for graphic processing can be included, which, after the input of the measures introduced, show the effects of the deviations in the course of a success control.