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Planview Customer Success Center

How do you track and manage performance of projects?

The process of comparing actual performance with planned performance, analyzing the differences, and taking the appropriate corrective action is core to project management using Daptiv. The project status is a regularly updated set of metrics to capture and track project change. Since Daptiv PPM delivers data in real time, updates are available immediately. In addition to native fields to track basic project information, user defined custom fields can be created to track customer-specific data, such as specific project area health statuses (budget health, resource health, etc) or other information, such as custom phases, or project expense totals.

Using customer defined field controls will prevent user data entry errors and provide consistent structure around project control. Changes to status-level fields can be tracked on-demand and in real time. Dashboard reports can also present project status and attribute history with user-defined business control rules to visualize trends. On-demand status reports are viewable within Daptiv PPM, but can also be created as reports within Cognos and scheduled to run on a regular basis and emailed to interested parties (including non-licensed users).

Time tracking is also an important control and monitoring tool. Users enter time or update progress on a regular basis and actuals are applied to the project. This allows the creation of variance reports, and an understanding of where tasks may have been underestimated (or overestimated). Users have the ability to enter ETC (Estimate to Completion) into the timesheet to alert the Project Manager that more time is needed on a task than was originally estimated. Project Managers can use timesheet data to understand project financials as well, as labor costs are calculated based on hours multiplied by the user's hourly rate. All variables within timesheets are available within Cognos for reporting and analysis. Timesheet data may be exported to Excel, or accessed in the Cognos engine for reporting purposes.

The Issues application keeps team members aware of events that may impact the project. Information such as issue owner, due date, potential impact, and action history can be recorded within the issue application and used for tracking, reporting and historical purposes (such as lessons learned). Custom views can be created within the Issues tab to monitor items on a project by project basis, or to display information across projects.

Most Daptiv customers take advantage of the Daptiv Dynamic Application™ feature. A Dynamic Application™ is a robust customer-created (wizard driven interface) data management solution. Customer-specific applications can be configured to create consistent and specific repositories to house any other data that an organization or a Project Manager feels is relevant to their project. Dynamic Application™ data is available for reporting, using either custom views or the Work Intelligence™ engine, and can also be exported in a .CSV format for reporting in other applications. Common customer examples of Dynamic Applications™ include change management trackers, expense trackers, contact logs, ROI trackers, lessons learned trackers and benefit tracker surveys.