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Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution Overview
Generating Business Value Through Strategic Alignment
Published: October 20, 2003
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Introduction
Manage Projects as a Collective Portfolio for Better Decision-Making
Optimize Resources Across Your Organization for Sustained Competence
Streamline Project Management Performance for Competitive Advantage
Strengthen Collaboration Across the Enterprise for Improved Productivity
Drive Business Value
Next Steps
The Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution is ideal for organizations that
need strong coordination and standardization between projects and project managers, centralized
resource management, or higher-level reporting about projects and resources.
Introduction
In a competitive business climate, your organization's ability to efficiently align resources and
business activities with strategic objectives can mean the difference between succeeding and just
surviving. To achieve strategic alignment, organizations are increasingly managing their activities
and processes as projects—in essence, projectizing their business—to monitor performance more
closely and make better business decisions about their overall work portfolio. By planning and
tracking projects with clarity and precision, organizations can respond with greater agility to the
demands of a fast-changing business environment.
Strategic alignment for enterprise project management
Making your strategic goals a reality requires technology that is robust enough to support your core
business and yet flexible enough to accommodate your existing processes. The Microsoft Office
Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution provides this infrastructure, so your organization can
gain visibility, insight, and control its portfolio of projects, as well as improve productivity, reduce
cycle times, decrease costs, and increase quality.
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Manage Projects as a Collective Portfolio for Better DecisionMaking
More effectively manage your company's project portfolio by continually identifying, prioritizing, and
investing in projects that align with your corporate strategy. By doing so, you can make sure your
company's efforts are spent only on activities that contribute to the bottom line.
The Microsoft Office EPM Solution can help you manage your project portfolio effectively by enabling
you to:
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Fairly evaluate project status and quickly identify at-risk and underperforming projects using rollup scorecard reports that graphically display key business metrics.
Integrate critical project data as Web parts into your executive-level dashboard side-by-side with
other critical information for a more complete view of your business.
•
Gain insight into the performance of your overall portfolio by identifying trends and problem
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Understand the impact of trade-offs and evaluate strategies to mitigate risk using what-if
areas using powerful analysis tools.
scenario modeling features.
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Optimize Resources Across Your Organization for Sustained
Competence
People are the most valuable—and often the most expensive—assets of your organization. To
maximize productivity and be cost-effective, it is critical to assign the right people to the right
project teams.
Managing people across an organization, however, is complex. Resource information is often
controlled in various departments, making it difficult to forecast short- and long-term resource
needs accurately. Without a complete understanding of the skills and availability of its staff, your
organization cannot strategically hire, deploy, and develop resources that match the needs of your
project portfolio.
The Microsoft Office EPM Solution provides you with powerful resource management capabilities to
assist you in achieving the greatest return on your investment in your employees.
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Better assess resource efficiency and activity across projects by accurately and consistently
•
Assemble high-performing project teams using staffing tools that help your organization optimize
•
Effectively determine hiring needs by forecasting short- and long-term resource capacity and
tracking resource use and workload.
resource allocation and assignments from a central resource pool.
project demands.
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Streamline Project Management Performance for Competitive
Advantage
Whether delivering products or services, all organizations need to meet project deadlines, budgets,
and stakeholder expectations. To maintain customer satisfaction and meet customer expectations,
no room exists for project errors or delays.
To stay competitive, companies are increasingly implementing initiatives to improve their project
delivery by continually reducing cycle times, minimizing costs, and controlling quality. These
initiatives require skilled people, standardized processes, and superior technology—unified and
driven by effective project management.
The Microsoft Office EPM Solution enables your organization to streamline project management
processes for greater performance:
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Achieve organization-wide compliance and greater efficiencies in project delivery by capturing
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Consistently meet project goals and attain higher customer satisfaction by creating plans that
•
Gain a deeper level of project governance and control through project performance, issue, and
•
Comply with government and regulatory requirements by integrating standardized methodologies
and deploying best practices and continually improving processes.
reflect realistic schedules, resource requirements, and budgets.
risk tracking capabilities.
with your existing project management processes.
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Strengthen Collaboration Across the Enterprise for Improved
Productivity
Effective communication is essential to achieve project success. With clear communication
processes, team members can share knowledge, work together smoothly to complete tasks and
deliverables, and respond quickly to change.
Project teams, however, are becoming more dispersed—both organizationally and geographically—
threatening productivity and elevating the need for technology that can meaningfully connect team
members to maintain coordination and quality.
The Microsoft Office EPM Solution provides an infrastructure that strengthens collaboration and
accountability among all levels of the organization.
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Empower managers and project teams to make timely, informed decisions by giving them Webbased access to real-time business-critical project data.
Increase participation in the project management process by enabling team members to easily
manage, track, and report on their project activities through familiar tools, like the Web and email.
•
Realize greater accountability through a central tracking system that enables project teams to
•
Gain higher quality and efficiency by jointly developing and organizing project-related
record, assign, and resolve issues.
deliverables using a central document repository with version and editing control.
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Drive Business Value
The Microsoft Office EPM Solution is built on a flexible platform that can be customized to support
your existing processes and integrate with your line-of-business systems, so you can get the most
out of your current technology investments. With the Microsoft Office EPM Solution, your entire
organization can work together to continually improve processes, increase efficiency, and facilitate
knowledge sharing, driving a sustainable return on your investment.
Learn more about the technologies that comprise the EPM Solution.
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Next Steps
Microsoft has developed an extensive network of solution providers who can provide skilled
professionals to tailor a solution to fit your business needs and get the most of your investment. To
start building your own Microsoft Office EPM Solution, contact one of the many Project solution
providers.