When managing publicly funded projects, success is typically determined by whether they are completed on time and within budget, as well as how well community expectations are managed along the way.
This is no small feat. And let’s face it: if you’re not hitting your deadline, you’re likely over budget because every day you miss completing your project costs money. Investing in the right tools to manage this is one key to success.
Envisio Projects, released in November 2023, has been designed specifically for public sector organisations to help them address what matters most: visibility, collaboration, and transparent communication. And with these newly released features, you can further improve your ability to internally manage your projects and communicate project progress.
Let’s face it: if you’re not hitting your deadline, you’re likely over budget because every day you miss completing your project costs money. Investing in the right tools to manage this is one key to success.
Let’s break down the new features and enhancements…
Envisio Projects now includes:
Interactive Gantt Chart enhancements for improved visibility and productivity.
OpenAPI to integrate data from other systems such as your budgeting software to maintain project budget and actuals.
One-page project summary reports for easier, more transparent communication.
Gantt charts are critical to getting visibility into project activity and ensuring things get done on time.
We know Gantt charts are critical to getting visibility into project activity and ensuring things get done on time. It’s important to have the ability to visualise project timelines and see a snapshot of status to understand the big picture across the organisation–this is especially true when juggling multiple projects across multi-year timelines. Without visibility of timelines, dependencies, and your most important resource—people—you’re operating in the dark.
Let us help you turn on the lights…
Advanced Gantt filtering
When looking across all projects, you can now filter information to show customised views. For example, as a Director or Portfolio Manager, you may want to configure the Gantt chart to only show projects marked with the ‘some disruption’ risk status within the ‘plan and design’ phase, and within a particular department. This view can then be downloaded as a CSV, image, or PDF to be used in meetings, presentations, or as a snapshot overview to support discussions in identifying issues or conflicts early.
Multi-project visibility
In addition, you can now easily view multiple projects and tasks at a bird’s eye view with the ‘zoom in’ or ‘zoom out’ feature, or toggle between day, month, quarter or year to give you the short to long-range project plan and better manage overlapping timelines.
Drag-and-drop task management
With this enhanced functionality, you can now update timelines with a simple drag-and-drop interface and create or delete dependencies. All updates are auto-reflected in the task and auto-sorted by start date to save you time and keep you organised.
The interactive Gantt chart is about visually understanding task interdependence and timeframes, enabling you to easily make the necessary changes while looking at the big picture.
Default Project Phases for General Projects
General projects can take many forms, and we understand project managers need the flexibility to define the unique project phases for each type of project, however PMO teams also want to ensure consistency across their project templates. Now you can have the best of both worlds, with default project phases introduced for General project templates.
Improvements to Project Tasks (Filtering)
Easily monitor the health of your sub-tasks with new filters in the project task list, allowing you to filter by complete/incomplete tasks, by employee or by due dates (including overdue tasks).
Favourite Projects and Project Dashboards
Expanding on our popular feature in Envisio Plans, now you can star/mark projects and project dashboards as favourites to easily and quickly access the ones that are most important to you. This includes a new filter option to simplify your projects list just to display your favourites!
Your budget data auto-updated to project snapshots with OpenAPI
Some of the biggest challenges of managing large-scale projects come down to working within different systems; keeping information siloed, creating manual work, or having incorrect or outdated information.
Let’s use budgeting software as an example.
Using our OpenAPI, Envisio Projects can now pull data from budgeting systems to show up-to-date ‘budget’ and ‘budget spent’ and then auto-calculate the ‘percentage of the budget spent’ for your project.
This can provide a powerful summary when reviewed alongside the project progress percentage to provide a holistic view of project health. This summary data, which can be updated within Envisio on a frequency of your choosing, can be used in internal project snapshots, reports, and external project dashboards to showcase budget transparency and identify risks and solutions.
Managing expectations with project summary reports
Now that we’ve got a handle on managing time and budget, we can move to managing expectations. We are big believers in the power of transparency; and our reporting capabilities run deep to meet the needs of different users and audiences. Envisio Projects integrates seamlessly with Envisio Plans to leverage the full power of Envisio’s reporting capabilities, but we also recognise that sometimes less is more.
In addition to Project Dashboards, with the new Project Summary Report you can generate a one-page PDF overview of any project with just one click. These progress reports can be used among project teams to mitigate delays and cost overruns or shared with elected officials to foster transparent communication and gain a shared understanding of priorities.
Ultimately, Envisio's goal is a positive perception of local government and the work being done.
Trust comes from doing what you say you’re going to do when you say you’re going to do it.
Large-scale projects (think bridges and roads) impact residents daily. Getting them done on time, within budget, and with regular communication along the way helps to build trust and community pride.
For more information on this exciting enhancements, get in touch to speak to your Client Success Manager.
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