It's a regular Friday afternoon, noon, during the ever-lasting Corona crisis. As project controller, you have to spend all afternoon calling colleagues to tell them to deliver project progress and schedules before the weekend. Then you often spend some time trying to piece together all these separate progress reports. Soon it's 6:30 p.m. and you want to get from your home office to the kitchen to start dinner. As usual, an early weekend is out of the question.
Current state of a project controller
Some project managers forgot to send an update, others reported the numbers slightly differently. After a lot of copying and pasting, you are able to make the forecast financially. You can look at the really big differences and a report comes out that is reported to the management. You haven't been able to do a really good analysis yet, that will come next week... This is a situation that we encounter a lot with new clients who work (partially) on a project basis. Everyone keeps their own spreadsheet and once a week or month this is all merged into one whole. Of course, this often involves too much work, after which the question arises whether we can implement a more effective method of project planning. And all this without chasing the user out of his spreadsheet, because yes, that works so nice and familiar. In the context of project management, we try to ensure that a project controller within an organization can spend his time as usefully and effectively as possible. The goal is that quick insights and analyses can be made that are of interest to both the financial branch and the business.
In the context of project management, we try to ensure that a controller can spend his time as usefully and effectively as possible.
One of the solutions we offer for this purpose is Vena Solutions. Vena offers a user interface in the familiar and flexible Excel, but with a robust database on the back end. Furthermore, Vena has its own workflow, audit trail and automatic aggregation of data making it perfect for project planning.
What we see a lot is that organizations that try to eliminate spreadsheets often return to them (in part) anyway. This is the gap that Vena is jumping into.
Just a step back to Friday afternoon at noon, but now with Vena.
The project controller sees from his Vena dashboard that 95% of the project managers have updated their schedules. In fact, the project managers have already received an automatic email from Vena yesterday to update their schedule. Each person has their own task where they can see the latest figures and update them through Vena in Excel. When saving, these figures are not saved locally but directly into a database.
As a result, the controller immediately sees the new state of affairs in his status report and his forecast provides a complete picture of all projects on an aggregate level. He asks the 2 project managers who have not yet completed their task to do so briefly. He then walks through the projects and documents some outliers. At four o'clock, Vena sends an automatic mailshot of the report to management.
Using Vena, the project controller can again spend more time analyzing and checking the schedule. Also, the person no longer has to deal with tying together spreadsheets.
.webp)