Fulcrum 'enables total enterprise project management'

Date: 21 August 2006	Issue: Two hundred (21/8/06 - 25/8/06) (ICT World)
Category: Local News

"In terms of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) view of a project lifecycle, any project is underpinned by the following process groups: initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and closing," says Dries van der Colff, director of Fulcrum. "In fact," he adds, "in most organisations the life of a project is tracked even earlier, from the registration of an idea, through an approval and budgeting process, before a project is registered."

Some organisations even regard the tracking of benefits long after the project has been closed, as part of the project lifecycle. Since each of these processes has its own distinct requirements, each process generally has its own governance and tools, resulting in a disconnect between the processes. To ensure continuity throughout the entire project lifecycle, Fulcrum Business Solutions has developed a K2.net 2003 template linking enterprise workflows developed in SourceCode's K2.net 2003 with Microsofts Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Suite 2003, he adds.

Microsofts EPM delivers the goods in terms of project execution and monitoring, assuming that the pre-execution process have been taken care of. Experienced project managers know that transition between planning and execution needs to be managed to deliver a project on time, on budget and to expectation.

Getting a project off the ground is about the people at the heart of the project process establishing a common vision and understanding of the goal to be achieved. It is also paper-intensive with a mountain of paper forms that need to be signed and approved by management, he continues.

The Fulcrum K2.net 2003 - EPM template is designed for use in K2.net 2003 Studio. It aims to enable users to integrate workflow-driven project initiation or approval processes with their Microsoft EPM applications.

In a completed process solution, the approval of a project concept triggers the creation of project schedules, based on specific enterprise project templates in Microsoft EPM, he says. K2.net process fields and project-level metadata generated in the initiation processes are accurately and quickly mapped into Microsoft EPM, ensuring a smooth flow of data between the systems, he claims.

The Fulcrum K2.net 2003 - EPM template saves companies three to four months of custom integration and costs less than one month of development, says Van der Colff. The template ensures that any changes made in either system will automatically be updated in the other to keep both synchronised with no extra effort from users.