The "Integrated Project Control System" is the UTA's intranet-based Project Management portal application which is used to initiate, update and oversee the implementation of UTA Capital Development projects. It provides a central portal where Project Managers and project personnel can view UTA project specific information.
IPCS Sample Screen
Development of IPCS began in 2006 to provide UTA users with a single point of access for the variety of software applications being utilized throughout the organization as part of their project management activities.
UTA recognized that a reliance on a variety of systems to provide the collective project management functions needed to manage their entire collection of projects was requiring increasing levels of work by multiple team members simply to share data between disparate systems, including:
Microsoft Excel ® for reporting
JD Edwards ® for financial management
Primavera P6 ® for schedule management
Palisade @RISK ® for risk analysis
SIRE ® for document management
UTA found that in order to make the use of multiple, independent software products work as needed, select users would have to move UTA project data by hand between the systems, and then use other applications (such as Microsoft Excel ®) to modify the collected information in order to create reports on the current status of those projects. These status reports would then need to be packaged and dispersed among the appropriate managers so that analysis could be performed on them and decisions made. The inefficiencies of this process became quickly apparent to UTA management and they decided to find a better way.
UTA management decided that it needed a centralized method for determining the general status of project work, identifying high risk project areas, and communicating project information amongst stakeholders. Additionally, they felt that a centralized project controls system that could be used by project managers to manage the entire life-cycle of project activities and provide advanced reporting and data-mining capabilities to upper management for more expedient access to all data repositories was also needed.
The solution chosen was to create an "Integrated Project Control System" (IPCS) that could best meet the identified needs. This solution was developed in a joint effort between UTA and Parsons Brinckerhoff (PB) to provide UTA with a web-based, portal solution, easily accessible by anyone on the UTA network, providing real-time project information on request.
IPCS provides a unique solution in comparison to the off-the-shelf software alternatives available in the marketplace, because it did not require UTA or its suppliers to replace any of their existing applications; instead, it introduced a central portal system capable of presenting users with the project data residing within the existing applications.
This solution has allowed UTA to minimize the financial burden typically related with implementing new software solutions, while ensuring that existing business processes and activities were not interrupted during the deployment of the new solution. This has provided UTA personal, and it's suppliers, with the ability to capitalize on the knowledge and processes already in place, while providing Project Managers with more expedient and reliable access to project data.
<< Using the Training Module | Accessing IPCS >>