By Jason Ames, PMP, and Kimberly McDonald Baker

Continuing our discussion from the previous blog article, we are ready to address success factor 2 in the Key Drivers to EPPM Success.

All Business Systems Talk to Each Other

An Enterprise Project Portfolio Management system is one of many business systems that an organization may use to improve its operations, but it must not live in a vacuum. An organization’s projects touch accounting through project costs and expenditures. Projects touch engineering through cost and material estimating, drawing releases, and change orders. Service projects are affected when scheduling client engagements.

There are countless other examples of how the suite of business tools that organizations possess depends on the information in other systems. So the question to ask is, how do they communicate? Too often, organizations require functional employees to “fat finger in data” for one business system while another person in another function enters that same data in another system. When this works perfectly, an organization loses resource hours – but mistakes are often made, and incorrect information is entered into one or more business systems. Mistakes like this are entirely avoidable with today’s integrated business systems, as most offer an open architecture to allow for an easy data flow. At the very least, they can import and export information in a way that another system can easily read.

By integrating business systems, an organization ensures data reliability while reducing redundancy and freeing up resources to focus on other significant areas of added value, such as maturing the organization’s project management practices.

Reference this Project Partners article to indicate the financial benefits of maturing your project management practices: Return on Investment! Building the Business Case for Professional Services Automation and Project Portfolio Management.