Solutions for Project-Oriented Companies

The Challenges

Project-oriented companies are companies where most of its people work together in different formal or informal teams. Project teams can be long-term, lasting several months or even several years, or they can be very short-term, lasting only a few weeks. The project itself might be a formal contractual work for a client or an ad hoc internal committee to work on a specific problem. Project team members may span different departments as well as different geographic locations, and involve staff from operations as well as management. Given today's highly demanding work environment, staff members will most likely need to work on several projects at the same time.

Project-oriented companies can be found in many different industries ranging from consulting, contract manufacturing, trading, to telecoms, government and defense. All of these are fast-paced industries where productivity, efficiency and quality of execution and deliver are of utmost importance.

The challenges are enormous and obvious. How do employees keep track of all the projects he/she is involved with? How can project managers keep track of project statuses when project team members might be in different locations or in the field and in different time zones? How can project members effectively collaborate and share knowledge and information? Given all the projects a person works on, what are the most important tasks to work on next and is there anything that needs immediate attention? And most importantly, how can management know how each project is doing at this moment - and not a quarter later.

With so many things to keep track of, it is no wonder that many projects fail or are over-budget. The statistics are not encouraging:

• 28% of projects fail or get killed before completion - Standish Group
• Roughly 40% of all IT projects fail or are killed - TechRepublic
• 74% of all IT projects fail, exceed budget, or are delivered late - Gartner Group
• 51% of IT projects exceed the budget by more than 200%, delivering only
• 75% of projected functionality - Gartner Group
• 46% of projects are behind budget and
• 28% are challenged (failed due to budget or schedule overruns) - Standish Group

People working in project-oriented companies are usually under high stress and time pressure, juggling many things at the same time. Our SFM product is designed to precisely solve these pains.

The Solution

GanaWare SFM product is designed to facilitate proactive collaboration among people. Unlike traditional collaboration software that purely acts as tools, our SFM actively motivates collaboration and thus automatically generates synergies. It actively monitors and seeks information that a person might be interested in and notifies him/her in real-time. It actively monitors work progress and produces alerts and alarms if things are not moving in the right direction. By foreseeing problems before they occur, SFM helps minimize project failures and delays. It also actively monitors schedules and tasks and generates reminders of tasks that need to be completed or performed. We call this "synergized collaboration."

Besides providing "synergized collaboration" capabilities, our SFM product also contains a collection of Business Productivity Tools. People in project-oriented companies need tools to help them keep track of projects and to manage their time. They need tools to communicate, collaborate and share. They also need tools to visualize project progress as well as visualize performances of the project team and the individual. The tools should also remind them of important events as well as alert them when something out of the ordinary occurs. All these tools are well integrated into the SFM environment.

Benefits of Synergizationn

The benefits of Synergization through our SFM product can be critical to business success for project-oriented companies. Our product addresses all the key project management problems found in multi-project multi-facet distributed workforce. It offers substantial benefits that can immediately improve work satisfaction, project success rate as well as your bottom line.

Synergized Collaboration

Proactive synergized collaboration means reduced communication cost, improved productivity and more synergies. People spend more time on productive work rather than trying to figure out what's going on in the project.

Increased Awareness

Automatic and personalized distribution of prioritized business information and business events dramatically increases awareness not only on your work, but awareness of how the whole team, whole department or the company as a whole is performing. Awareness, in real-time, is crucial in the fast-paced business world we live in.

Avoid Project Failures

Awareness also directly helps reduce project failures. By automatically monitoring project progress and project events, and informing project managers and team members of any potential problems or unusual event patterns, actions can be taken to resolve problem issues before they escalate beyond control.

Avoid Project Delays

Likewise, awareness also directly reduces the chances for project delays and over budget. By constantly monitoring project milestone and task statuses as well as schedules and task lists, and reminding project team members of deadlines and tasks to be performed, employees can focus on tasks that are more important and urgent. By being aware of priorities at all times, employees can focus on getting the project delivered on time and within budget. In essence, our SFM acts like a digital PA (personal assistant).

Better Project Management

SFM allows the project manager to have a bird's eye view of the whole project, its statuses and where it is heading via a collection of critical real-time measures and statistics - all parts of our SFM Dashboard technology.

Better Vision

The SFM Dashboards provides visualization of performances and measures for all levels within an organization - from an individual to projects, groups, departments, divisions all the way to the corporation as a whole. Many companies are implementing incentive plans for the entire company. Incentives help motivate the company to achieve corporate goals and objectives. Our SFM dashboard allows employees to see how he/she is doing in any instance. It also allows senior management to see how the whole company is performing at this moment - not one quarter ago. The SFM Dashboard technology is the core component for our management methodology support that helps companies implement methodologies such as Balanced Scorecards, Six Sigma, EVA, etc.