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Are you a finance pro struggling to accurately forecast project costs and budgets? Drowning in fragmented data from disconnected systems? Does prioritizing the right investments and analyzing ROI feel like a shot in the dark? How about a 387% ROI in ~7 months while transforming your organizations Project and Portfolio Management? If this sounds good to you, buckle up, because Microsoft Project Online is about to become your new BEST friend! Let’s get into the Benefits of Microsoft Project Online for Finance.
Microsoft Project Online is integrated within the Office 365 suite saving costs on licenses, contract costs, support fees and administrative overhead. It provides centralized visibility and control that finance teams crave when it comes to managing the bottom line of projects and initiatives. No more guesswork or surprise overruns.
In this article, I’ll show you my favorite Benefits of Microsoft Project Online for Finance and how it provides forecasting capabilities with intelligent cost tracking, and objective financial decision-making across your full project portfolio. You’ll finally have a proactive command over project finances instead of constantly playing catch up. Ready to take your financial needs to new heights? Then let’s Buckle up!
Benefits of Microsoft Project Online Series
This article is part of a series dedicated to helping various roles within organizations harness the power of Microsoft Project Online. Whether you’re in financial planning, budget forecasting, financial analysis, or executive leadership, this series will provide you with insights and strategies to leverage Project Online effectively for enhancing financial management and strategic decision-making.
In this installment, we’ll delve into the top five Benefits of Microsoft Project Online offers to finance teams. From centralized cost tracking to comprehensive forecasting capabilities, each benefit is designed to revolutionize how finance professionals command project finances. Get ready for an in-depth exploration of the tools and techniques that will elevate your financial management game to new heights.
Top Benefits of Microsoft Project Online for Finance
Forecasting project costs accurately and gaining a unified view of the full project portfolio pipeline is paramount for finance teams. Here’s why this benefit stands out as the most crucial:
- Comprehensive Forecasting and Budgeting
- Improved Budgeting Accuracy: Visibility into proposed projects/initiatives allows for objective evaluation based on cost data, resulting in more precise budget forecasts and prevention of costly overruns.
- Strategic Project Prioritization: Ranking potential projects by projected costs enables finance to prioritize investments based on budget constraints and financial impacts.
- Workforce Planning Insights: Forecasting future project demand provides insights into hiring needs, contractor costs, and resource management, essential for effective financial planning.
- Maximized ROI Analysis: A consolidated pipeline view facilitates ROI and business case analysis for each project investment, aiding in maximizing returns.
- This forecasting capability empowers finance teams with the foresight and data needed for effective planning and budgeting, leading to significant cost savings and improved ROI.
- Optimized Cost Tracking and Reporting
- Integrated Cost Capturing: Seamless integration with ERP/accounting systems ensures accurate tracking of project costs.
- Centralized Reporting and Analytics: Access to centralized reporting and analytics tools provides insights into project costs, facilitating informed decision-making.
- Visibility into Rolling Costs: Real-time visibility into rolling costs and burn rates over time enables proactive cost management and adjustments.
- Maximized Cost Savings
- Reduced Overhead: Consolidated system reduces administrative overhead and streamlines financial processes.
- Early Identification of Resource Needs: Early visibility into resource needs allows for better negotiation of rates, resulting in cost savings.
- Elimination of Last-Minute Costs: Avoidance of last-minute premium contractor costs through effective resource planning.
- Governance, Compliance, and Invoicing
- End-to-End Audit Trails: Comprehensive audit trails and approval workflows ensure compliance with financial governance requirements.
- Cost Allocation and Invoicing Support: Support for cost allocation, chargebacks, and invoicing streamlines financial processes.
- Adherence to Financial Governance: Ensures adherence to financial governance requirements and standards, reducing compliance risks.
- Productivity and Insight
- Centralized Visibility: Centralized visibility eliminates fragmented data and provides a single source of truth for financial information.
- Automation of Reporting: Automation of manual reporting and data consolidation saves time and increases productivity.
- Data-Driven Decision-Making: Data-driven decision-making based on comprehensive insights enables effective prioritization of projects.
Fastest Cost Savings and Increase in Productivity EVER!
In a previous post, The Complete Guide: Unleashing The Benefits Of Microsoft Project Online For Team Members, I covered my favorite benefits of having a Centralized Platform. The majority of these benefits also save time and money for the organization. If you’re like 80% of businesses out there that has a 1 to 1 application to feature/need ratio: so there’s an application for each i.e. projects application, timesheets application, etc. On average, it’s about 8 applications and I’ve even seen organizations that had multiple departments that have their own applications which compounds it even more.
This is where having a centralized solution increases productivity and also lowers costs. From a productivity perspective, each Team member will only need a single login to access all of these features because it all falls within the Microsoft O365/M365 solution. All of the data is accessible across the entire solution. Here’s some role-based time savings:
- Project managers:
- Manual Reporting for Project Status, Issues, Risks, Resource Utilization, Cost/Work/Date Variances, Upcoming work, Critical Path and more is ALL Eliminated. Large organizations usually need 2 resources to support the Project Managers as well as them Project Managers spending hours each week compiling their status and information from stale, disparate systems.
- Schedule updates are dynamic and updated OnDemand, providing up-to-date and visible to stakeholders. This removes the need for Project Managers to continuously stop and update stakeholders. Their time spend doing weekly status of schedules is reduced up to 75%.
- Issue and Risk Management is tied to Project Schedules and Deliverables providing bottom-up traceability and visibility. It also shows impacts over time for process improvements and prioritization of investments and ROI to improve project performance.
- Weekly Status Meetings, Daily Standup meetings and last-minute status updates are virtually reduced to minutes instead of hours. This not only saves time for the Project Managers but EVERY Team Member for EVERY project they’re assigned to. The ability for Team Members to push status to the schedules asynchronously is an absolute game changer.
- Resource Managers: Check out the article on Resource Managers Best Friend
- Manual consolidation of Resource estimates, monthly resource utilization, end of month true-ups, timesheet reconciliation and disparate spreadsheets are completely eliminated within a few months of implementation.
- Turnover rates are reduced due to better work-life balance as a result of having full visibility of current and future workload demands.
- Microsoft Project Online’s methodology agnostic capabilities work for any type of organization and scales perfectly. Whether the organization is consulting, operations, manufacturing, mixed, software or any combination, this solution will provide full visibility into all of this work.
- Leadership:
- Many organizations conduct year end and next year planning by gathering all of the key architects, key stakeholders and resource managers to plan out the next year. With Project Online this is mostly eliminated because it’s a continuous process and leveraging the Portfolio Selection features the portfolio is always optimized and visible.
- One of the biggest challenges for leadership is understanding the impacts of the give and take of project selection, increases or decreases of budgets and resources. With Microsoft Project Online we can quickly see the impacts of the viability of changes to our portfolios budgets, resources and timeframes.
- Finance:
- In addition to all of the previous benefits, the Finance Teams are generally focused on planned, actual and variances of costs. This is where Microsoft Project Online shines. The dynamic scheduling by the Project Managers allows for timely, up to date financial information for leadership and finance. As projects dates ebb and flow, so do the costs projects in the future. My finance folks Love, Love, Love this!
- Before using Microsoft Project Online my Finance teams dreaded working on proposals; any changes in scope or people would kick off a series of other steps cause people to have to scramble for last minute calculations. With Microsoft Project Online, we can modify the scope, resources and even the rates and everything updates automatically. That means no missed happy hours for Finance on Fridays ; )
Hopefully you agree, Microsoft Project Online is your best friend for finance professionals wanting to have the easiest and most robust solution in the world of project finances. With its robust forecasting, streamlined cost-tracking capabilities, and seamless integration, Microsoft Project Online equips finance teams with the power to steer projects toward financial success while avoiding the pitfalls of budget overruns and financial uncertainty.
If you’d like to know more about the Benefits of Microsoft Project Online, check out the other articles that benefit Team Members, Resource Managers and Project Managers or feel free to reach out to me with questions. I’ll also add a link below for the Forrester Report about the Benefits of Microsoft Project Online.
Forrester Report – Microsoft Project Online Benefits and ROI
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