In the world of product development, delivering a project on time ensures maximum revenues, contains development costs and produces the highest potential for profits. However, increasing business, product and process complexity makes managing these projects challenging. With all the moving parts involved, trying to keep projects on track amidst changes of scope, resource constraints and unanticipated development delays is no easy task. Project managers spend so much time collecting data and reporting on status, that they often are left with little time to properly manage the schedule, align resources and identify and mitigate risks.
A report by The Standish Group found that only 36% of projects were delivered on time, on budget, and on target. Forty-five percent (45%) were late, over budget, or missing planned features, and 19% failed to be completed. This certainly isn’t good news for companies needing to innovate faster to beat their competition in highly competitive markets.
Ideally, at the start of the product development process, a plan is made with a timeline and budget that the project is meant to maintain. When roadblocks start to spring up and trigger changes in the process, teams can get off track, affecting the ultimate offering to customers. With customers demanding enhanced experiences and product customization quickly, to stay competitive, companies must not only meet these demands but exceed them. Structured collaboration can ensure teams work efficiently and deliver on schedule.
With this increase in product complexity, development teams also are becoming more complex and generate a vast amount of unstructured data. Project managers spend much of their time collecting this data, but often it becomes outdated at the same rate it takes to look for it. When different teams within one project work in silos, it creates a disconnected project with disorganized data and version control issues.
Wasting time looking for the latest version or working on the wrong version only to find out changes were made to it since you started are both frustrating and inefficient. Bringing your team together on a common platform that links product development data to the project, allows real-time data updates that ensure easy data access and alignment across the project team. The platform becomes a one-stop-shop for everything project-related.
By connecting to a common platform, each project member’s deliverables are immediately updated in the project plan, giving the project manager real-time visibility. With real-time project information collected automatically, the project manager no longer needs to collect the status of every team member. We call this invisible governance – because you can govern the project and preserve collaboration without interrupting those doing the work, leaving more time for innovation and enabling all teams to finish on schedule.
By eliminating non-value added tasks, project managers have more time to ensure projects are delivered on time and on budget, while project team members can focus on innovation that creates experiences for customers that become market successes. With the 3DEXPERIENCE platform and ENOVIA, on cloud or on-premise, project managers can easily manage access rights, improve collaboration, optimize planning, and manage schedules to meet key milestones. For project managers, the ability to keep up with the progress of their projects and access the platform from anywhere with real-time notifications will improve product development.
To learn more about managing successful projects on a single, connected platform, visit https://www.3ds.com/products-services/enovia/resources/project-management
Program_and_Project_Management
