How do you manage information in the day-to-day management of your company’s project portfolio?
Managing projects involves many people, areas, meetings, strategic decisions, and other aspects. All of these events and people generate information that is often scattered across spreadsheets, emails, various folders, documents saved to the desktop, and even handwritten notes.
This fragmentation of information can become a serious problem in project management, as it can compromise team organization and the ability to manage the project effectively.
Why Does This Happen?
The simplest answer to this question would be: lack of organization.
However, there is a larger factor behind it that influences this lack of organization: organizational culture. Information ends up scattered due to gaps in organizational culture, such as failing to establish standardized processes and documentation policies, as well as a lack of channels and/or tools that facilitate communication between teams and project management itself.
Projects and Processes need to work hand in hand; otherwise, project information is bound to become fragmented.
Other factors, such as an excess of applications, the use of informal channels, lack of tool integration, insufficient training for the teams involved, and decentralized communication, also contribute to fragmentation.
Problems Caused by Fragmented Information
It’s important to understand that, in this context, fragmented information refers to poor organization of project-related information and even its decentralization. After all, the information exists, but since it’s scattered, it isn’t accessible to everyone involved.
The impacts of this fragmentation tend to be negative, resulting in:
- Loss of productivity and time;
- Difficulty tracking project progress;
- Communication failures;
- Slow and inefficient decision-making;
- Decisions based on outdated information;
- Difficulty identifying risks and security flaws;
- Dependence on specific people and the loss of information and lessons learned.
Impact on Decision-Making
Reliable information ensures that decisions made are well-founded. Without it, the progress or success of an organization’s projects is genuinely compromised, since the information being analyzed doesn’t match the project’s actual reality.
The more fragmented the information, the harder it becomes to build a reliable view of deadlines, costs, scope, resources, risks, performance, deliverables, and other elements.
And this is where a pillar that makes all the difference comes in: centralizing is not the same as simply gathering. Information needs to be gathered while also creating conditions for that project data to be continuously updated and to actually support management.
To achieve this, it’s necessary to have a technological tool or software that not only centralizes information and facilitates team communication, but is also capable of providing reports and analyses to support decision-making.
Regular data collection and analysis routines can significantly help improve the quality of the information stored.
However, one important caveat needs to be made here: centralizing information does not mean centralizing decisions — it simply means making the same information available in one place so that everyone involved is on the “same page.”
Interact PRJ: Technology as an Ally in Information Management
Interact PRJ can be your ally in preventing the fragmentation of your company’s project portfolio information.
The solution enables project planning and tracking according to life cycle phases, oversight of every stage of project management processes, and management of scope, schedule, costs, resources, quality, communications, risks, and project integrations.
But since the topic at hand is project information management, let’s highlight a few features that relate directly to this problem:
- Integration with Interact Document, for managing, accessing, and controlling all documents;
- Automatic sending of messages, pending items, and deadlines;
- Integration with Interact Governance, to align projects with strategic planning and track goals and objectives;
- Enables exporting projects to Excel or Open Office spreadsheets, eliminating the need to maintain parallel controls;
- Features Project Canvas, for visualizing a project’s entire scope in a single image, while also making collaborative development easier;
- The Reports application enables the generation of reports with all system information, allowing for customization according to each user’s specific needs;
- A dedicated Meetings and Minutes feature, enabling more efficient and transparent collaboration.
Interact PRJ also features artificial intelligence tools that make project managers’ routines easier and more efficient.
