Sage Coretime as a Project Management and Risk Management Tool

“Project management is the art of making the right decision”.

In order to make the right decision, you need tools to help the process. We explain how to make the right decision, and the role a vital tool such as Sage Coretime can play in controlling your timesheets, projects, billing and staff.

Project Choices

Project managers, particularly in the service sector, are faced by many choices – such as the choice of team members, skill–sets and availability.

When choosing which resources to deploy, you need to categorise the skill–sets of your resources. Enabling you to easily choose or substitute the appropriate team member. Sage Coretime allows the easy categorisation of staff–skills and grades, allowing easy substitution or selection of additional resource to your project.

Decision Analysis in Project Management

Some key steps of decision analysis are as follows:

Decision Framing:

Indentify potential problems and opportunities – a project overview as in Coretime, can assist in identifying these, and allow corrective or avoiding action to be taken.

Assessing the business situation – potentially overrunning projects can easily be indentified and corrective action taken to ensure revenues are not lost. Sage Coretime gives you information to identify this immediately.

Determining business success criteria – this usually means monitoring the duration, cost and scope of projects. Proactive alerting, as in Sage Coretime, can assist greatly with controlling these areas and stop project overruns.

Indentify uncertainties – Indentify and try to minimise uncertainties, particularly over direct cost overruns.

Generate alternatives – particularly where key team members are involved, one needs to be able to identify rapidly the equivalent skills and resources for easy substitution of skill sets. This is easily done in Sage Coretime.

Modelling the Situation

Create a project model or budget, re plan and schedule it, duplicate it, to test all the alternative outcomes, and the ultimate return on the investment. Sage Coretime allows this to be done rapidly

Quantitative Analysis

The project tool should allow sufficient information to be supplied to allow informed QA decisions to be made, based on correct and up–to–date information. This allows decisions to be made on what is determined to be important. These factors can be shown on your Project Dashboard in Sage Coretime and deployed around the organisation teams.

Actual Performance Tracking

Once a project is underway, it is vital that up–to–date information is available to ensure the performance of the project is tracked. This means – excellent reporting features, alerts, and a key performance dashboard, allowing the potential performance shortfalls to be indentified and corrected.

Sage Coretime, with its robust data repository and extensive reporting/dashboard functionality, provides this, as well as controlling the basic timesheet entry, billing and staff resource control. This allows all users to see the information they need. No more lost or corrupted spreadsheets!

Risk Management

Risk management is needed particularly when appraising and bidding for new projects, by modelling potential projects from previous projects using project and budget copies. Sage Coretime can assist in this assessment, and estimate the eventual outturn, and allow better bids to be made.

During the project, constant risk reviews can be undertaken, with project outturn forecasts, allowing problems to be indentified and corrected before revenues are lost.

With instant project information to hand, risk management can be carried out on a daily basis. Decisions can be made on better utilising existing assets, contingency planning, or investing, or substituting resources.

Review of the project once complete, can then be done accurately with lessons learnt and a fuller project closedown and review done. This allows the next project to be refined and carried out more successfully, in the strive to improve efficiency and staff utilisation.

Sage Coretime allows all these things to be done more efficiently, controlling timesheets, projects, budgets, billing and your expensive staff resources efficiently.

Sage Coretime from onesys the best way to control your timesheets, projects, billing and staff.

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