Ensure Process reliability in projects - on 5 levels

If you want to establish global organisational or development processes in your company, you need to be assertive and have a method that ensures traceability and acceptance. The aim is to reduce resistance by making it as easy for employees to adhere to processes as it is to go to the coffee machine in the morning.

Our approach to ensure a high level of process reliability is based on the following 5 levels:

1. Templates: Create the basis for process reliability and standardisation along processes
   What is to be done?
2. Tasks: Ensure required process sequences in project execution
   How is something to be done?
3. Rights: Rely on a graduated authorisation system
   Who is allowed to do what exactly?
4. Reporting: Establish consistent reporting with intermediate checks (quality gates)
   How far has the project progressed? Which issues require attention?
5. Documentation: Make compliance and process reliability traceable
   Have all steps been fulfilled? When was something (re)decided or new measures introduced?

(1) Create the basis for standardisation along processes with project templates with project templates

There is far more to project templates than you would probably expect. It is an instrument that is successfully used to standardize and control business or development processes.

Just to give you an idea: It is not unusual for our customers to have project templates with 400 or even 800 mandatory work steps that have to be worked through (in a specific order) for each new project. OEMs and suppliers pack their partners’ extensive catalogues of requirements into their templates so that compliance and process reliability is ensured at all times.

Creating these customized project templates with Projectworx is extremely simple. Starting from the Gantt plan, you set up a project as if you were actually planning it. You define phases, activities, specific tasks, assign responsibilities via roles and designate the project as a template. So far, so good.

The potential of project templates is far from exhausted. Templates also allow you, for example, to (re)use deliberately designed

• task views
• task types
• checklists
• milestone documents or
• status reviews,

tailored to specific project types.

You set all of this up once in the template project and make the entire package available immediately when you create a new project.

We would like to illustrate the possibilities in more detail using a specific example:

Use case: Stage Gate® process

Depending on the use case, a project template only contains a rough basic plan with milestones or precise definitions of process sequences and a variety of plan elements. In this way, process models such as the Stage-Gate® model can be mapped directly in the project – without separate process descriptions.

Read more here: Improve project quality with Stage Gate processes

(2) Ensure process flows in project management through workflows & checklists

The checklists mentioned in the Stage Gate example are an effective way of checking compliance with process steps. Visual elements such as traffic lights or colour coding make it clear at a glance where action is required.

If you also want to influence task execution or require process flows in collaboration, you can organize your task management accordingly.

• Task types
  Set up individual task types for different purposes. Each type can contain its own description and input fields, categorisations and field authorisations.
  
• Workflows
  Workflows that facilitate your collaboration are quickly configured. The options range from simple notifications when the previous task has been completed to approval workflows and multi-stage processing workflows that take the status of the respective task into account.

Read more: Coordinate collaboration for smooth project execution

(3) Ensure information and data security through a tiered authorisation system

In a project management tool, you want to make all relevant data centrally available – but not to the same extent for all employees.

With Projectworx’s comprehensive rights management system, you can not only control access rights to modules or reports, but even authorize individual fields if required. This puts you in the best possible position when it comes to information and data security and enables you to provide competent information in the TISAX® assessment.

(4) Establish consistent project reporting with quality gate reviews

Good collaboration with management requires a reliable reporting system and boards that show at a glance where things are not going well. With Projectworx, you can ensure that up-to-date and reliable data is provided – at the touch of a button in report form or automated and visually striking in the dashboard.

(5) Make compliance with processes and requirements traceable

Documentation plays a key role in terms of process reliability and product liability, especially in highly regulated industries. Companies must be able to prove compliance with processes and requirements. But the same applies to everyone else: playing it safe is always a good idea. After all, you don’t want to have to explain yourself in the event of a dispute.

Use the following recommendations to set up your project documentation:

Use the following recommendations to set up your project documentation:

• Integrate custom web forms to customize the project documentation to your needs and make the data available in a central location.
  
  
• Define mandatory actions and processes and track them through task management:
  • Involve your partners and customers in the communication process. Send messages directly from the relevant tasks to document correspondence in the right place.
  • Define mandatory actions and processes and track them through task management.
    
• Accurately log new agreements
  • Mark decisions as such in logs so they can be found quickly.
  • If this results in new ToDos, assign the relevant log item to the person responsible during the meeting. The minute item will immediately appear in their to-do list and they will also receive a notification.
    
• Prove that new requirements from your customers have been distributed to all responsible parties. If necessary, request read receipts from your project team members and document these in the system.
  
  
• Document proof of release with Projectworx where it best serves your processes. In report form or directly in the task.
  
  
• Also document errors in trials or product defects in your own task lists, together with the measures taken to rectify them.
  
  
• Set up gate documents for your project monitoring in order to uncover deviations from quality specifications or process sequences. Make critical issues visible in the gate reviews and document the steps that have been proposed and taken to counteract them.
  
• Document errors and experiences. Pass on lessons learnt via the standard processes and ensure the quality and efficiency of future projects.

Establishing processes and ensuring process reliability with a project management tool

ould you like to optimize processes in your company or are you responsible for establishing consistent processes in your projects? We would be happy to present the possibilities based on your specific use case. Make an appointment via our online calendar and use a test account to familiarize yourself with the individual tools at your leisure.