PA Service Summary of Benefits

Tangible

1. Fewer tool licenses and less tool training is required when a Project Administrator (PA) supports multiple project teams.

2. Project managers and team members are freed from the need to become project management tool experts and can concentrate full time on managing their projects.  Tool training for project managers is eliminated.

3. In large and multi-project environments a PA ensures that planning and reporting are consistent in format and terminology and conform to organization standards thus eliminating the requirement to provide training and enforce compliance.

4. The PA provides a single a focal point for executives, management, and project personnel to access project information, and eliminates the need for a project office person to roll individual project plans' status together to produce summary status reports.

Intangible

5. Higher quality planning, tracking, and reporting because the PA works with the project management tool full time compared to the project manager who would use it no more than 10% to 15% of their time.

6. New project managers become effective more quickly because the PA can help them begin their planning, tracking, and reporting immediately.  Without the PA Service a new project manager would require training in the use of the tool and the organization's usage standards and then take 3 to 6 months to become proficient.

7. In large and multi-project environments the PA is ideally positioned to provide cross plan and cross organization dependency resolution and resource loading reconciliation.

8. Slippage information is less likely to be filtered by the tendency of the project team to report status favorably, thus improving the likelihood of early warning of missed targets to the project executive.

9. A PA with senior level project management experience will mentor inexperienced project managers and teams in the construction of proper project plans and ensure planning and tracking integrity.  PA mentoring will improve the performance of inexperienced project managers and reduce the time required for them to become effective.

10. A PA with senior level project management experience can provide a project executive with valuable project management guidance.  For example, ensuring that plans contain the information needed to provide early warning of milestone slippage, and that reports are frequent enough to allow remedial action before its too late.

The PA Service Cost/Benefit Analysis Worksheet

The PA Service Cost/Benefit Analysis worksheet helps the project executive translate the PA Service Summary of Benefits described above into dollar savings.  It is initialized with data for a project organization consisting of seven 10 person project teams.  With salaries, training costs, PM tool costs, and personnel capability and turnover rates at their initial values the worksheet graph shows a saving of $140K in the first year implementing an In-House PA service, and a first year saving of $132K in the first year using PAI's Time Shared PA service option.

Edit the Assumptions in red to reflect your organization's parameters and the graph will automatically replot.  In the "Calculations" section of the worksheet the "No PA Service" column should reflect your current project administration costs with project managers doing their own PM tool work.  The "PA Service" column will indicate costs using either the In-House line or the Time Shared Service options.  As long as the In-House or the Time Shared Service line are above the $0 axis the PA Service is more cost effective.

Under Project Manager Information we assume the project administration function typically occupies 1% to 2% of a project manager's time for each project participant.  Thus project administration for a 10 member project team is likely to occupy approximately 15% of the project manager or team PA's time.  If 100 project participants are spread over 10 projects the PA function will require 10 different people's time, one PA function for each project.  A single PA providing Project Administration Services can offload the project administration work of those 10 individuals allowing them to complete their projects more quickly.

Of the 10 benefits listed above the worksheet can only calculate the 4 tangible benefits.  The decision maker should consider the value of the intangibles as they bear directly on the effectiveness of the project organization.

For more information on what it may be costing your company not to optimize your Project Administration process visit our Project Administration Justification page.