The Council for Geoscience is rolling out Project Portfolio Office, an online project portfolio management (PPM) and collaboration application, to meet its need for a more integrated approach to project management activities.
The Council for Geoscience is a key component of the National Science and Technology System. It undertakes geoscientific research and services for a variety of clients, including the state. Its client base is national, throughout the SADC region and further afield, including North Africa, Asia and South America.
Peter Motaung, ICT Manager at the Council for Geoscience, states that the organisation sought a project management system to collate, consolidate and administer project activities, with a view to generating improved management information.
“The Council is involved in a number of commercial projects that need to be tightly planned and executed within usually constrained parameters, and we were finding that resource planning, time sheet management and project reporting were all becoming quite challenging in a number of respects.br
“By implementing PPO, we will have access to a common, consolidated, real-time view of the status of all our projects, allowing us to generate relevant and appropriate decision-support information. PPO provides the best fit for our current business needs, including adherence to our ‘Software-as-a-Service’ (SaaS) applications strategy and to support local products and services wherever and whenever justifiable.”
At this stage, the Council’s main users of PPO will be its project managers, project administrators and scientists, who will be utilising the solution for the running of statutory and commercial projects, as well as management staff for high level reporting. According to Motaung, the Council is also currently investigating the potential use of PPO for its electronic document management requirement.
Says Guy Jelley: Project Portfolio Office CEO: “With its time and cost management, resource and capacity functionality, as well as planning and task management features, PPO was the ideal choice to meet the specific needs of the Council for Geoscience. A true SaaS application, the solution will be immediately available to the Council once implemented, with no long-term contract, is billed per active user per month, and provides a real-time ability to change your user base.
“From a support point of view, PPO is the only solution of its type that has been developed in South Africa and is locally supported. This makes it a great fit for the Council’s requirements and maturity levels,” he explains.
