Project & Portfolio Assurance
Project Assurance is an essential part of the checks and balances that make PRINCE2 work and always near the top of the list of concerns of senior management ‘how do I know projects are doing what they say they are?’.
In practice it often doesn’t get done well because it is difficult. PIAB provides a great set of tools to help you or your teams with assurance activities. Central to this is the collection of usage and version information which the system does automatically providing detailed recent activity/audit trails for each user and the ability for administrators to search for particular actions/activities within this.
Detailed assurance reports on key management products like Plans tell the user all about access and distribution of the content but this is most valuable when provided at a project level or multi project showing the status of all management and specialist products helping identify which require further investigation.
For the PSO the ability to find out how frequently key products like risk registers are being updated and used across all projects is very valuable in identifying areas of best practice and enabling targeted interventions at possible failing projects.
Project and document status flags can be customised to meet the needs of your organisation enabling you to state things in language everyone understands and to easily report on these.
Searching for an answer
Searching is possible on all commercial Editions of PROJECT in a box. On Personal this is the ability to search the notes associated with each file.
On the multi user Editions all files are indexed on the server (word etc but depending on your server set up this can index emails and PDF documents) and users can search for keywords within the versioned files themselves. Results are shown once filtered for permissions and indicate which versions of a file the term was found in. This is invaluable for post project review or gate reviews as it allows the searcher to determine when a term, value,reference first started appearing and who introduced it.
Assurance Tools
Just the file version history.
File version history and searching on file notes. The Project Assurance report is also provided although it has less information available as no user audit trail is recorded here.
Full capability as described here.
Full capability as described here.
“Providing your PMs and PSO people with the tools they need to assure delivery of work packages, projects, programmes and portfolios. Providing the transparent picture you need to be confident about delivery”
Product Focus (click icon for full info)
PROJECT in a box -
The following links allow you to explore some of the key capabilities in more detail:
Microsoft Project Integration
Hosting Service (SaaS)
Or view full product matrix