Work Management
Work Management
The Work Management capability’s enablers include Planning and Scheduling, Changes, Risks, and Issues, and Execution and Tracking. Each capability within the Planview Capability Framework has a distinct set of features and functionality, business processes, best practices, and analytics and reports that deliver value to customers in the form of specific business outcomes.
Enablers and Business Outcomes
Planning and Scheduling
Provides work managers with the ability to view and manage all work details. They can develop the schedule or plan by defining the timeline, milestones, activities, and resources required to deliver the work. Resulting business outcomes include:
- We can implement a standardized work planning and scheduling process for projects and other planned work.
- We can plan work milestones and categorize these milestones to drive project status reporting.
- We can define the phases of work or activities at a detailed level that supports resource forecasting and planning.
- We can forecast the effort required to deliver the work, expressing this demand against the relevant organizational and resource type.
- We can use schedule templates to apply planning standards and to drive consistency and efficiency.
Changes, Risks, and Issues
Supports the definition and classification of change requests, risks, and issues and the tracking of any subsequent actions, approvals, or escalations. Resulting business outcomes include:
- We have a standard and consistent method for capturing and managing project change requests, risks, and issues.
- We have a single organization-wide repository of change request, risk, and issue information, which can be automatically consolidated into project status reports.
- We can measure the volume of project risks and group and categorize them to understand their impact on the successful delivery of projects.
- We can measure the volume of project issues and categorize them to identify projects that could deliver late, over budget, or outside scope or quality.
- We can understand the impact of change requests on project schedules and financial plans and approve or re-baseline accordingly.
Execution and Tracking
Supports the project manager to manage the project through the execution and delivery stages and to report on the overall status and health of the project. Supports the management of all work types, whether project-based or lights-on work. Resulting business outcomes include:
- We can monitor actual effort reported to timesheets and determine how this effort has contributed to project progress.
- We have a single, timely, and accurate organization-wide view of project status, with all reporting needs being met from this single version of data.
- We can view portfolio level status reports based on project status information.
- We can compare the performance of a project against financial and schedule baselines and schedule variance alerts, ensuring that remedial action takes place.
Best Practices
Standardize processes
Standardize the process for defining work and associated timelines, milestones, and activities. Create a formal and standard process for creating and closing a new Change, Risk, or Issue (CRI) to provide transparency into how work is defined and CRIs are received.
Ruthlessly prioritize
To produce successful results, work managers must proactively prioritize. Throughout the process of creating timelines, milestones, and activities, it’s critically important to remain aligned to organizational priorities and not lose sight of the overall goal while using the detailed frame of reference needed to plan work.
Centralize information
Centralize project information to monitor work progress and health, coordinate execution, and ensure timely delivery aligned to strategic objectives. Provide a single source of truth for all project details to enable visibility into dependencies, risks, and shared commitments.
Track everything
Provide access to relevant, accurate, and timely data, ideally in an easy-to-understand report or dashboard. Use visual tools that compare performance to financial and schedule baselines that enable upward and downward transparency for alignment throughout the organizational hierarchy. Actively work with stakeholders to capture KPIs that can quickly identify the need to pivot, adjust funding or capacity, or pull back.
Manage stakeholders
Understand what your stakeholders need to know about the project and provide accurate and timely updates to stakeholders. Keep an open line of clear communication with all stakeholders and keep all internal communication within a centralized location to minimize confusion.
Empower teams
PMO leaders should empower teams to deliver in a manner that supports the methods and approaches that best suit the team—whether waterfall, agile project execution, or a mixed hybrid approach. Execution today is a mix of technologies and hybrid methodologies that when aligned, provide a single line of sight that ensures strategic delivery.
Manage complexity
Follow these Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) rules to simplify risk identification, improve planning and accountability, implement smarter budget and resource allocation, and enhance visibility. Following these guidelines helps ensures no duplicate work will take place—and facilitates the management of challenges project managers face.
Avoid scope creep
Scope creep occurs when a project’s requirements or tasks change so much that it puts the project at risk for not finishing on time or within budget. Make sure you’re adhering to the boundaries laid out in the scope statement once you’re in the execution phase, and that stakeholders know the implications of making any changes.
Processes and Reports
Work management provides project managers the ability to develop a work plan or schedule by defining the timeline, milestones, activities, and resources required to deliver the work. This capability allows work managers to define and classify risks, issues, and change requests, track and manage project execution and delivery, and report on the overall status and health of projects.
Related Capabilities
Resource Management
This capability provides a single repository of resource availability information to an organization. Managers can track and manage assignments of named resources to forecast future demand. Time reporting information is also collected.
Read moreFinancial Planning
This capability supports the planning and management of financial plan information connected to products, programs, and projects, including the creation of high-level estimates as well as approved and baseline budgets.
Read moreCapacity Planning
This capability provides the mechanism to set resource capacity targets which can be used to analyze capacity against demand, and assess the organization's ability to continue with existing investments or adopt new investments.
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Supported Solutions
Project Portfolio Management
With a line of sight from strategy to delivery, Planview enables leaders to optimize program and project portfolios, balance capacity against demand, prioritize work, focus resources, and empower teams to deliver.
Read moreProduct Portfolio Management
Planview’s Product Portfolio Management solution provides scalable enterprise-level software that enables the management, prioritization, and continuous innovation of products in development.
Read moreStrategic Portfolio Management
With dynamic planning and execution, Planview’s Strategic Portfolio Management solution enables leaders to invest incrementally, quickly shift resources, and use cross-functional teams to align organizational goals to an ideal team work structure.
Read more