Chapter Meeting

Enterprise Project Management (EPM)

Successful organizations understand how to align resources and business activities with strategic objectives.

About the Program:

Successful organizations understand how to align their resources and business activities with their strategic objectives. It's a simple concept - until you try to do it.

To achieve this strategic alignment, forward-thinking organizations are managing their own internal activities as projects. An Enterprise Project Management (EPM) solution provides the infrastructure that enables this to happen. By using an EPM system to carefully plan and track their portfolio of projects, organizations can make better, more cost effective decisions about resources. And they can establish repeatable processes that allow for agile responses to fast-changing business environments.

Benefits include:

• Optimize resources across your organization: Understand your staff's skills and availability so you can strategically hire, deploy, and develop resources that match the needs of your project portfolio.
• Streamline project management: Reduce cycle times, minimize costs, and control quality.
• Strengthen collaboration across the enterprise: Improve productivity by creating clear communication channels.

A Center for Business Practices study of organizations using EPM processes and tools showed an overall return on investment of 27.9% in the survey group.

Oakwood is one of a select group of companies that has met Microsoft's stringent partnership requirements for becoming a Gold Certified Partner for the Microsoft Office EPM Solution. We'll deploy a customized Microsoft Office EPM Solution that will improve productivity, reduce cycle times, decrease costs, and increase quality.

We bring together best practices in project management, client, server, and Web-based technology with Microsoft Office Project 2003 to give organizations everything they need to manage enterprise-wide projects:

• Standards-based best practices approach to project management.
• Microsoft Project Professional is the project management program for enterprise project management. It connects to Microsoft Project Server.
• Microsoft Project Server provides a central storage area housing project and resource information.
• Microsoft Project Web Access enables team members to view and update project information on Project Server.

Microsoft Office EPM Solution helps manage your project portfolio by enabling you to:

• Evaluate status and quickly identify at-risk and under performing projects using roll-up scorecard reports that display key metrics.
• Integrate critical project data as Web parts into your executive-level dashboard with other critical information for a complete view of your business.
• Gain insight into the performance of your overall portfolio by identifying trends and problem areas.
• Use what-if scenario modeling to evaluate risk mitigation strategies and to understand the impact of trade-offs.

Speaker Biography

Mr. Frank Records is a Director in Oakwood Systems Group's Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Practice and is responsible for leading the Strategic Implementation Team that installs and configures Microsoft's Project Server 2003 toolset. He has extensive experience in project management, software development team management and earned value measurement systems (EVMS) as well as cost and schedule implementation and control.

In addition to Frank's responsibilities as a Director, he manages several projects with primary responsibility for all phases of the project lifecycle as well as development of business process improvements leading to company standards.

He is a proven team leader who can direct very diverse groups to complete critical projects on time and within budget. His communication skills and professional manner make him effective at the executive as well as the team level. During his twenty+ years in management, he has served clients in a variety of industries including Government, Healthcare, Food and Beverage, Insurance, Tax Services, Financial Services, Bus Maintenance, B2B e-Procurement, Life Sciences, Telecommunications, Retail Grocery, Aerospace Engineering and Manufacturing, Microelectronics and Electronics.

Mr. Records specializes in project recovery and business process definition, especially around project management methodologies, to assist organizations in the control of their business.

Frank earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Aeronautical Administration from Parks College of St. Louis University and his MBA from Lindenwood University in Saint Charles, MO.