Project Management Office is a Center of Excellence that helps to attain consistency, quality, and supervision of projects across the enterprise by maintaining crucial standards, methodologies, and tools.
At any given time, multiple projects are executed parallelly which requires proper planning, initiation, resource management, monitoring, control, and execution over a project lifecycle.
As projects move, it is the responsibility of the PMO Director to take certain crucial calls by understanding which projects contribute to the organizational goals and which projects do not.
Eventually, the success of a PMO depends on governance, leadership, applications used, analysis, and prioritization of projects. Even after carefully adhering to all these, several roadblocks and pain points can hinder the initiatives of PMO.
Here we will discuss how Apty can help the PMO to overcome the pain points.
4 Biggest Pain Points Faced By Director of PMO
- Implementation of New Processes
- Regular Changes
- Continuous Monitoring
- Achieving Consistency
1. Implementation of New Processes
PMO faces resistance from internal stakeholders while implementing new processes. The people involved are usually get overwhelmed by the technology or application used which hinders the implementation.
The stakeholders involved with projects must be trained on the new processes. Traditional training often causes obstacles as the learning curve is longer than expected and even after its completion, one can’t assure success.
The ideal approach would be to use an application that will expedite the training process and help employees pick up the new processes on the job.
How Apty solves the problem:
- It guides employees to follow the process with the help of on-screen guidance where they are taken from one step to another seamlessly.
- When processes evolve, you can communicate the change to your employees via the announcement feature that notifies them from within the application. From there, you can launch a workflow, a video, or a document to help demonstrate the change.
- Application analytics can be used to determine how any application or process is being used by the employees, before even finalizing the business process.
- Based on the analytics, you can design the business process that would suit your employees and the organization’s vision.
Takeaway:
Internal resistance, implementing a new technology, and ineffective training could cause the poor adoption of new processes which could impact the organizational goals. Apty can help you overcome these effectively, no matter how complex the process as it helps them with it in a step-by-step manner.
2. Regular Changes
The PMO works towards making a project successful by achieving the organizational goals. But, it is common for the project to go through multiple iterations because of several factors like inputs from the C-suite executives, shareholders, and other circumstances.
The change of scope could force the PMO to pivot the project to match the new goals and create the best possible outcome of the situation at hand.
For instance, during the pandemic, the sudden shift to remote work impacted the flow of projects in hand and in some cases, the future of the portfolios was left hanging. In such scenarios, the PMO typically uses multiple tools, frameworks, and processes to make the transition as smooth as possible without affecting the scope of the project.
A Digital Adoption Platform like Apty can help you manage change better and accelerate the adoption of the change.
How Apty helps to solve the problem:
- When change happens abruptly, communication is key to make your employees aware of the situation. Apty’s ‘Announcement’ feature helps to notify every employee involved in the project about the change in real-time.
- Automation is key to ensure that employees focus on crucial tasks at hand that can make the project successful rather than doing the repetitive administrative work.
- Apty’s chatbot enables the automation of everyday tasks, even the complex ones. The bot creates conversational scenarios where the employees have to respond to question posed by the bot. The bot will help them fill the fields in any application without even opening it, boosting employee productivity and saving several man-hours that can be put to better use.
- When the scope of the project changes, the training, applications used, and process changes. Apty helps you to customize the workflow in no time as it is a low-code solution. You can create entirely new workflows in a matter of hours.
- The in-app help deck consists of an onboarding checklist. It has a set of onboarding flows which the employees have to complete to get a working knowledge of the application. These onboarding flows can be segmented based on their roles which can help you reduce employee confusion and enhance their experience.
Takeaway:
A project can go through multiple iterations because of several factors. This could force the PMO to change the direction of the project. To manage such changes, organizations often use different types of frameworks and processes which could lead to confusion. With Apty you can manage these changes effectively and avoid confusion.
3. Continuous Monitoring
Projecting success of the project heavily relies on the fact that how effectively the product, application, or technology is being used by the employees. You have to take a call whether the tech investment is justified or not.
Often, companies invest in the best applications thinking it will fuel the project and help them achieve their organizational goals. But in reality, unless these applications are in line with organizational goals and the employees use them in the desired manner, the project cannot be successful.
To overcome this, you need an application like Apty that can help you to analyze the data and identify the trend.
How Apty can solve the problem:
- Get access to intelligent workflow and application analytics to learn how your employees are adapting to application and process.
- Understand how many processes are initiated vs how many are completed and also the number of processes completed vs abandoned.
- You can gain insights into the type of training content used the most, which process consumed the maximum amount of time. And based on this, you can optimize the whole project and drive efficiency at scale.
- Get your data segmented based on the location and role. This will help you to identify, by role, the users struggling with the process. This will help you customize the training content by role, rather than for every user, enabling them to overcome their challenges with the application or process.
Takeaway:
It is important to identify the trend and roadblocks while implementing the projects. When several projects are being executed simultaneously it is obvious that some crucial details could be missed out. Apty’s analytics helps you to overcome just that as it helps to qualitatively measure the user engagement, efficiency, and productivity with the process designed for the project.
Based on these analyses you can modify and optimize the process. Further, you can improve the knowledge content for each user group by creating contextual walkthroughs and training material.
4. Achieving Consistency
When it comes to executing a project, consistency is key wherein every stakeholder uses all the applications as it is meant to be to increase the chances of success. Organizations have to follow the set guidelines and must be compliant with them.
Irrespective of the type of training provided, it is difficult for employees to remember how to fill a particular field.
Apty can help you ensure process compliance by helping employees enter the data in an intended manner without undergoing any form of training.
How Apty helps to solve the problem:
- Data validation is a tool within Apty that helps you to ensure that the data is entered in the correct format. When data is entered incorrectly, it sends a warning signal nudging them to fix the error and make the proper entry.
- In the business world, there is no universal way of doing things and so processes are usually designed to suit the needs of the company. To make sure everyone is on the same page when it comes to adopting these processes, you create workflows that your employees can easily understand and follow so that compliance is never an issue.
Takeaway:
Accuracy in data entry is of paramount importance in today’s digital world. It is important to use a tool like Apty to ensure that data integrity and process compliance are maintained. Apty helps your employees to enter data in the correct format with help of a data validation tool.
It also makes sure that the process is followed as per the standards set by the organization to avoid any mishap or blunder.
By now we understand just how many challenges and hurdles the PMO faces while executing projects. This is why it is necessary to use a robust and reliable Digital Adoption Platform like Apty that can help you identify the roadblocks, measure the key indicators, create customized training, optimize the process and prioritize the projects which are crucial for the organization.
