What is VUCA and how does it impact project management for organizations? Harvard Business Review explains VUCA, short for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, as a trendy representation of the current business world. In the VUCA world, organizations are pushed to prepare for unforeseen challenges more than ever before, and rightly so. Case in point: the pandemic.  

Whether it’s increasing digital business models or hybrid work structures, businesses are forced to reshape and adapt at a rapid speed. Forward-looking companies have either already adopted or are looking to adopt agile project management techniques to enable transformation.   

According to Gartner, by 2024, the world’s 50% project portfolio management leaders will leverage complementary technologies to make strategic portfolio plans and new work management for the digital evolution of their businesses.  

To help our customers make project and portfolio management easier, we recently launched BrightWork 365 for Microsoft 365 and the Power Platform.  

See BrightWork 365 in Microsoft 365 in action

Here are three ways you can use BrightWork 365 to make your project management strategy more reliable.

1. To have a system for making new project requests  

Raising requests for new projects in a systematic way is vital for successful project management. It ensures that you prioritize your projects and allocate your resources in accordance with your strategic business goals.  

Having clearly laid-out project requests can help you address these crucial questions in a timely manner: 

• Who exactly is initiating the idea of a new project? 
• What is the project type? 
• What are the exact demands of this new project? 

• Does your team have the bandwidth to take on a new project? 
• Do you have enough resources to take on a new project?  
• Do you need more clarity on certain aspects of this project? 
• Is the budget and the scope realistic?  
• Will it be worth the time and resources? 

• Finally, should you approve this project request now?  

Brightwork 365’s ready-to-use process systems can help you figure these questions in advance of another project. It also provides a clearer vision and motivation to all the stakeholders and prevents the risk of overburdening them – a key element of successful project management. 

Ask for a demo to learn how you can create a new project request with a few clicks using BrightWork 365.

2. To have a project setup ready with stages and templates

Having a customizable template to set up your project can help you optimize resources in designing a project layout. There are in-built stage gates and check-ins at every phase of the project, which not only makes managing tasks much easier for every stakeholder but also improves the overall project quality.  

Here are some other key advantages of having a built-in project management layout. 

• You can streamline your project setup by using the Microsoft 365 apps you are already familiar with and bringing it all in one place 
• Leverage automation to save time and reduce errors  

• Have pre-defined acceptance criteria for deliverables 
• Ensure stakeholder satisfaction with a clear project charter, leaving no room for miscommunication or ambiguity 
• Allow every stakeholder to monitor the progress of the project 

With Brightwork 365’s user-friendly customizable templates, you can start every project with a clear vision and structure in place that helps you maintain transparency within your team.    

 3. To leverage Power BI to improve your portfolio management  

Juggling between several projects at the same time can make you lose sight of your larger business goals and strategy. With work environments going from hybrid to completely remote, project, programs, and portfolio management has become pivotal to your strategic goal achievement. However, it can get tricky to assimilate the data and information of multiple projects. This is where Power BI’s intelligence can make your life much easier.  

Let’s take a look at what Power BI can achieve for your project portfolio management.  

• Data mining – consolidate data such as trends from a range of sources 
• Data compilation – prepare data picked from large data sets for analysis 
• Data filtration – clean up the raw data by fixing any corrupt, duplicate, and incomplete data in the compiled data set  
• Data visualization – breakdown data and represent through easy-to-comprehend charts, graphs, and other visual tools 
• Tracking and Reporting – Power BI software can capture, analyze, and share the progress of a project with the stakeholders in a more relevant and interactive way, as compared to traditional work reports 

Power BI enabled Brightwork 365 has capabilities to understand the context of your KPIs and analyze results accordingly. Its real-time visibility can help you achieve successful project management by helping you to make more informed, data-driven decisions in the current ever-changing market scenarios.

Learn how to leverage Power BI to share reports and dashboards. 

As BrightWork 365 is configurable, organizations can easily implement it to set up their projects. Add your processes to the Microsoft 365 apps already in use by your teams and you are set for successful project management.