BY JONATHAN PATCHELL, NATIONAL SALES MANAGER (VERTICAL MATTERS)

A common struggle experienced amongst project managers is information management, namely the absence of a single source of the truth. While information flows from the field in dribs and drabs, they often lack a single view of all information to ensure they can make timely and informed decisions.

Instead, they spend their time entrenched in excel spreadsheets, having to make sure that field documents are transcribed and then stored, wasting resources that you and I both know would be best used elsewhere. This time intensive process creates gaps in knowledge, which affect your ability to effectively manage projects, and often lead to delays and cost blow outs that could have been avoided.
In our experience, the 3 things a Project Manager must stay on top of are:

1. Incidents on site.
2. Variations and unexpected events that affect the delivery deadlines.
3. Employee scheduling issues.

The consequences of having to wait for and collate all of this information can present a number of business challenges:

• You can’t easily identify or manage any employee issues that occur in the field. There is often a delayed communication line between the field and office, and events or trends in behaviours are dealt with long after they occur.
• Variations on site cannot be tracked and updated in the system in real time. This creates resource management issues that make meeting delivery deadlines, stock flow, and job allocation more complex.
• Because job information takes so long to be returned to the office, and processing this information is a very manual task, billing cycles are often extended which can have negative cash flow implications.

To mitigate these issues you need all information, whether digital or paper-based, to feed to a single source of the truth.

Information Management Systems: What does a single source of the truth look like?

While we have established that you need all information to make complete project management decisions. Timing also plays an important role in ensuring effective decision making, and ultimately reduced costs and increased returns. This is where we often see the advantages of a digital information management system.

Unlike a paper-based system, an entirely digital solution can be customised and updated instantaneously to ensure all relevant data is pushed to and from the field so that you always have all available information. And this information is structured and recorded in a way that assists decision making. This can be achieved via the use of dashboards for key information and the integration of forced workflows. In addition, implementing a system like the Kontrol4 solution in your organisation reduces the need for travel to your various field sites to check progress, resolve issues, and collect job data.

Implementing an information management system that provides one single source of the truth will create a number of efficiencies across multiple areas of your organisation.

Take the next steps and give us a call on 1300 667 999 to gain control over your information management in your organisation.