Review

What Keeps Executives Awake At Night?
By Dennis Bolles, PMP, dbolles@iserv.net

What keeps executives awake at night? In my 25 plus year career as a certified project management professional with extensive experience in the information technology, automotive supplier, mechanical engineering, architectural and construction services, office furniture, and project management consulting industries I have asked this question of numerous executives and have dealt with the issues behind the question myself in my various roles of responsibility. Everyone had their respective ‘hot buttons’, however one issue was common to all of them --- having enough information about resource utilization and costs to base decisions on that is readily available, accurate, concise and useful.

Information is the lifeblood of an organization!

Global competition, increasing market share, reducing cost, and improving profits all in the pursuit of producing better products and services faster through the use of high technology solutions are just a few of the driving forces that are causing organizations to seek better ways to improve time-to-market, cost-to-market, and quality-to-market. 

The use of computers in business as the primary information management and communication tool is as commonplace today as the telephone

The explosive growth of computer hardware and software technology has come to the rescue. Businesses can now gather and store vast amounts of information, however in many cases this new capability has also hindered the effective use of this information to manage work and make sound business decisions. One of the factors that hinders effective use of information, critical to the decision making process, is the lack of, or limited, capability to integrate the data between the various business systems and third party applications in use to day. Another issue is gathering accurate information in a timely fashion and then having the ability to easily consolidate and analyze this large pool of information without printing dozens of standard reports or submitting a request to the MIS department to provide you with yet another ad-hoc report in hopes that you will get the information you need in a format that you can understand and use. 

Information is truly the lifeblood upon which business thrives or dies. Having the ability to effectively gather, store, integrated, and retrieve information that is easily analyzed and displayed in concise graphical formats is the stuff that will help executives sleep soundly at night. There are numerous products on the on the market that range from the highest end ERP systems to applications that just address specific needs, such as time tracking and reporting, financial planning, etc. typically sourced from multiple vendors. 

Work Flow is an integral element!

Many companies struggle with establishing common processes, which are followed in a consistent manner across the organization. Typically the root cause of the problem lies in the fact that the business process has not been fully documented and subsequently maintained as changes occur. Frequent turnover in personnel, constant changes in organization structure, and implementation of new systems, minimal or lack of adequate training, are other reasons that cause problems with the accuracy and flow of critical business information, which create bottle necks because information isn’t processed in a timely manner to the right person. Integrating Work Flow into business systems that are used to manage critical information is the best way to ensure that the processes used to gather data in the correct sequence; store the information in a common database or integrate with other system databases; ensure that critical information is reviewed by the right person in a timely manner; that the approval process is properly adhered to; and that information required for decision making is readily and easily available to all who need it across the organization.

Effective management of information is the goal!

I recently became acquainted with a company by the name of Tenrox, (visit them at http://www.tenrox.com or contact them via e-mail at info@tenrox.com that has created a family of products including Tenrox PSA, which optimizes business processes for project oriented organizations, as well as other products such as Tenrox Time & Expense, Tenrox Expense Reporting and Tenrox Incident Management which automate time, expense and change management respectively. I looked in more detail at all these products and found them to be quite remarkable and almost too good to be true. All of the various modules that comprise this growing family of applications have extensive out-of –the-box capability, simplicity of design, and use for gathering, storing, integrating, analyzing, and producing information in concise easily understood formats. 

Tenrox PSA includes: Time Management, Expense Management, Cost & revenue, Invoicing, Change Management, Purchasing, and Executive Insight for multi dimensional data analysis, with new modules being added and improvements being made to existing modules on a regular basis. I have been extremely impressed with the functionality, ease of use, and total flexibility to modify these products to fit any environment because of their open architecture. 

Tenrox also offers a powerful and free software development kit and object model (Tenrox SDK) that can be used to access and enhance the core feature set of all its products. The server architecture uses Visual C++, Visual Basic and stored procedures to implement server side business logic.

Timeliness and accuracy count the most!

Another aspect of managing communications that affects the accuracy and timeliness of gathering information is ensuring that common processes and procedures are followed by all of the individuals inputting, reviewing and approving the data that is required to make critical business decisions. From a project management perspective this is particularly true of issue tracking and change management processes that are typically informal paper based systems, which require significant manual intervention and are not integrated with other project management or corporate based information systems. 

Tenrox Incident Management caught my attention as I was reviewing the various products Tenrox offers. Tenrox Incident Management is a Web based application, which tracks issues and change requests from creation to resolution. It supports a wide range of databases, is immediately ready for use; requires no setup time and additional costs; enables the user to report on issues, assignments and turnaround times; and provides instant access to project status which helps to minimize risks. 

Tenrox Incident Management is a customizable, platform independent, pure HTML solution that supports issue entry, assignment, and approval; help desk and report using Web browser. Tenrox Incident Management is designed to use Work Flow as a basis for its functionality. The package comes out of the box with a standard Work Flow process configured, which can be easily modified to fit any environment. The Work Flow steps determine order and manner in which the data is routed to complete the process Tenrox Incident Management can be easily integrated with your e-mail system to facilitate notification messages to be sent automatically to individuals who have been assigned responsibility for resolving issues, and also allows them to respond with updates back to Tenrox Incident Management. The application also notifies those who are responsible for review and approval when the proper step of the Work Flow process is completed. The features and capabilities of this product are outstanding and deserve serious consideration for companies of all sizes because of its ease of use, functionality, flexibility for modification, and ability to integrate with a wide variety of other third party applications.

Purchasing can be a can of worms!

Purchasing materials and services for projects is typically not initiated by a corporate purchasing department, but rather is a responsibility of the project manager, especially on large projects involving technical equipment or specialized services. The systems used to issue purchase requisitions, produce purchase orders, and track receipt of the goods and services is most often a paper based system and requires manual entry of data into the corporate purchasing system. Effective management of purchasing information, like all other key business functions, relies on following a consistent process that is well documented, which facilitates continuous improvements.

Tenrox Purchasing, the latest software offering from Tenrox, was another product that caught my eye because it also uses Work Flow as a means to ensure that purchases go through the right channels for approval. It forces Purchase Orders to move back and forth between states until all of the steps are completed and it can be easily customized to adapt to any organization’s process. Multiple purchase workflows can be created for different product lines, divisions, countries, etc. Each workflow has configurable states (action or status) and transitions (governing limitations or rules) between those states that must be followed from the time a purchase order is opened to the time it is closed (EG: a purchase order in the "New" state can never go directly to the “Closed” state, it must always go through the "Submitted" state first.) This product, like most of the other Tenrox products integrates with various e-mail systems to notify process step owners of the need to review and approve specific purchase orders.

Instant access via the Web!

All of the products in the Tenrox family are Web enabled which allows access from anywhere in the world where access to the Internet is available. Tenrox products can be purchased out right or obtained from Tenrox as an ASP provider. The products can also be installed on local servers connected to a LAN/WAN system and made accessible through internal Intranet distribution. 

Executive Insight, finally!

I began this article talking about what keeps executives awake at night and I will end it by telling you about Executive Insight (EI). What is EI? It is an online Analytical Process (OLAP based) that enables efficient access to information. Data is stored in a three dimensional cube (matrix) that provides the user to select, navigate, and explore information through an intuitive multi-dimensional data model (cube) using third party applications such as:

• MS Excel, Lotus 123
• Crystal reports
• MS Digital Dashboard
• A variety of business intelligence tools such as Cognos

This capability gives decision makers at all levels of the organization (CEOs, CFOs, Department Managers, Project Managers, etc) the power to explore complex business relations with the ability to drill-down/up and view information at any level of their organization, a feature NOT available through any standard report engine. The product allows the user to create group features in logical categories, using one view per category for:

• Ad-hoc access to all quantifiable information captured 
• Access to critical decision-making data based on comparisons of information across various levels of their organization’s hierarchy
• Data trend analysis and forecasting

Other features and benefits of EI are that it enables users to do:

• Advanced time analysis (Time Cube)
• Advanced expense analysis (Expense Cube)
• Advanced R&D analysis (R&D Cube)
• Advanced Cost Center analysis (Cost Cube)
• Advanced Revenue Center analysis (Revenue Cube)
• Advanced Issue analysis (Issue Cube)

Or any combination of the above (i.e.: Cost Vs Billing Cube) at any level of the organization or Work Breakdown Structures of a project; for example, you can view data:

• Per Date - Year, Quarter, Month, Day
• Per OBS - Sites, Groups, Teams, Users
• Per WBS - Client, Portfolio, Project, Task, Activity

EI provides users with the ability to slice and dice information an infinite number of ways and display it in an equal variety of report formats, graphical or tabular. 

The more I learned about Tenrox products the more impressed I was with their versatility. With all of the features, capability and flexibility these products have in common one would expect the cost of the product to be fairly steep. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that it is unexpectedly economical. I now know what to tell those executives how they can get a good night’s sleep by solving their information management problems.