Program Office Management Information System™ (PrOMIS™)
PrOMIS delivers a centralized environment where an entire project team works in collaboration with the Project Manager to effectively and efficiently share the responsibilities of project management. This communicative environment creates a project knowledgebase by using document approval cycles, supplying team organizational features, and assisting in the capture of correspondence both internally and externally.
PrOMIS centralized environment allows team members to easily locate data needed in a timely fashion while electronically routing data and reducing the delivery time of critical information. PrOMIS is an easily customizable solution with its document profiling configuration, data replication capability and collaborative management schema.
Not only is PrOMIS user-friendly, but it also offers remote access with retrievable data anytime, anywhere right at your fingertips. Members can even access the data while disconnected from the network through local, secure applications. While traveling on business, users can retrieve information on a plane, train or automobile using a modem link.
The power behind PrOMIS is the ability to leverage the security, reliability, and flexibility of your existing environment and customize the solution to meet your company's specific requirements.
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The ability for program offices to track information on their projects is paramount to the success of a company's objectives. The institutional knowledge generated during a project is easily lost in the maze of file structures and servers to which some team members have access and others do not. The PrOMIS solution allows a team to access the same information from multiple locations without relying on administrators to grant access to network drives.
PrOMIS is a Knowledgebase
Whenever information is generated for a project, that information is considered knowledge. By storing all the information in one location, PrOMIS acts as a knowledge database (knowledgebase) for all team members. This allows the team to draw on the knowledge created by other team members to improve decisions and better service the clients. To facilitate finding the knowledge, the PrOMIS suite is indexed to provide full-text searching including attachments.
PrOMIS is a Document Manager
Information that is important to the team can be placed in the document repository. The repository is excellent for posting deliverables, project policies, schedules, and other valuable project information. To facilitate document creation,PrOMIS includes a review cycle that allows for either serial or parallel review cycles. The reviewers are notified via email that a document is ready for their review and the activity of each review is logged for historical reference.
PrOMIS is an Organizer
Teams invariably have various sorts of meetings and action items. PrOMIS covers both these areas effectively. Action items can be assigned to one or more team members and team meetings or presentations can be tracked within the application for true historical project audits.
PrOMIS is a Communicator
To facilitate inter- and intra-team communications, PrOMIS provides the capability to post emails to and from outside sources directly from the team members' mailboxes. Instead of attempting to perform discussions through email, where there is a potential for loss of information or the risk of the right experts not being involved, PrOMIS includes a hierarchical discussion area whereby all team members can take part in the important discussions. Responses to postings are indented so readers may follow a discussion thread visually and not have to manually determine which posting responds to another posting.
In 1996, CSCI's management realized that keeping track of project documents was a never-ending battle. Documents could be found on local hard drives, network drives, floppy disks, and in hard copy. Sometimes those documents were available to team members through a shared network drive. But more often than not, the information was unavailable unless it was in hard copy. This was suitable for small, one and two-man teams. But as the size of the team grew, the information became more scattered. Management decided that creating a centralized storage area for a geographically dispersed unit would be the most efficient method for document storage and retrieval.
CSCI management also noted that there were other activities that teams performed that might be mimicked in an electronic environment, so CSCI decided to observe how the teams worked and to monitor the types of activities that team members performed in creating the data used in their projects. The activities fell into three areas: creating reference documents, managing the project, and informal discussions. The management team mapped out the processes used to create documents, schedule meetings, assign action items, report to clients, and create team consensus and handed the processes over to the development team.
Given the flexibility of the PrOMIS environment and its inherent ability to handle the format for electronic documents, the development team gathered requirements to develop the first version of PrOMIS in 1997 and have refined the functionality and added additional features along the way. CSCI uses the PrOMIS framework for every ongoing project and maintains access to the many project databases through our AsPIRE™ (billability) and Make It Happen (status reporting) applications.
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- Centralized Information
- Acquire the data when desired and needed.
- Document Approval Cycles
- Electronically route & track project documents to the rest of your team.
- Secure Access Controls
- Independent access controls allowing others to only view on a need-to-know basis.
- Communication
- Track correspondence and meetings, and assign action items.
- Electronic Data Routing
- Reduce delivery time of critical information.
- Remote Access
- Get your information anytime, anywhere.
- Work Offline
- On a plane, train or automobile.
- Customization
- Work accordingly to corporate standards and policies.
- Data Replication
- Download information needed; make changes and upload the information back to a/the team.
Today's demanding workplace requires sophisticated project management tools to track and maintain quality of products and performance. Unfortunately, most “shrink-wrapped” project management tools offered today are difficult to install, configure, learn and understand by the average user. In addition, Project Managers are burdened with the responsibility of creating and maintaining these tools for the rest of their team. Information “bottlenecks” and overall decreased team productivity are the ultimate result.
CSCI took the pro-active approach of providing our clients and associated stakeholders an effective, secure communication and collaborative tool where the entire team works together to create solutions, solve problems and manage projects anywhere in the world, anytime day or night.
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