R3’s Program Management for GovCon solution is designed to manage the “Soft Work” of Program Management. The soft work includes what is needed to provide programmatic management of your programs/task orders/contracts across a portfolio. And, it covers the work to manage the information, activity and interactions for specific programs.
If you look out in the market for “Program Management” tools you will primarily only find solutions that are actually project management solutions or managed a portfolio of projects. They are designed to handle the structured work of managing project schedules, tasks, EVM, etc. There are a vast number of such tools. And, most organizations use many different tools for this purpose.
The challenge with the soft work of GovCon program management is that it is often difficult to “get your arms around it” to make it more manageable. In addition, the work on programs can vary greatly. So, how do you address these challenges in a software solution?
Soft Work Activities of Program Management
We start by including out-of-the-box features that are common to GovCon Program Management. Let’s look at the key ones to get a handle on the types of “soft work” we support:
- Managing the core Federal contract/program data
- Related Program Documents, Policies and Master Data
- Program Review schedules
- CDRL/Contract (Contract Data Requirements List) Deliverable Management
- Program Overviews and Status Updates (including KPI’s)
- Action Items at the program level and cross-organizational
- Issue and Risk Management
- Structured engagement with customer through a customer portal
- Program workspaces where you store information and drive program activity
- Configurable reporting on programs and activities
Flexibility is Key to an Effective Solution
We then build in flexibility as a feature…
A big challenge in designing an off-the-shelf solution to manage the “soft work” of GovCon program management is that the use and requirements can vary greatly from program to program. You can be managing different types of programs and doing so in different scenarios. For instance, you may want to manage a set of O&M services contracts as a portfolio. Or, you may need to have a dedicated solution to manage a single IDIQ contract and its task orders. And, in reality no two programs or task orders are the same. They always vary slightly.
Yet, the work of Program Management is critical to the success of the program. Because of this many organizations have been forced to custom develop solutions to meet their program management needs.
That is no longer required. Our solution is designed to be unusually flexible. It can be deployed in different scenarios with different feature sets turned on and off. And, you are empowered to customize, extend and enhance the solution features using our built-in, very easy to use configuration wizards.
Going beyond the basics
Our solution has a range of capabilities built into it that allow your program management solution to be extended to meet more advanced needs. Let’s look at a few:
- As above, we don’t provide project management features in our solution. But, we do provide the capabilities to connect to just about any other project management tool such as Microsoft Project Server or performance data in databases and surface this information within our solution. You can even take action on this information.
- We also provide capabilities that allow you to access external systems or data sources and bring the information into your program management solution. The most common need is to access financial data such as information from Deltek Costpoint either directly or through an intermediate database.
- Program Management is usually thought of as post-award work. However, often Program Managers are also concerned with pre-award work. Our solution allows program manager’s to see and manage the pre-award activity that is occurring in other applications that run on SharePoint. Examples of pre-award applications are your Capture and Proposal Management system, opportunity management system, or, IDIQ Task Order system. This integration provides Program Managers with end-to-end visibility and the ability to manage and drive the activity.
- Leveraging our My Work add-on you can define and automate discrete business processes that support your programs. Often, these are cross-organizational processes. Some examples are Contract Modifications, CDRL Deliverable approvals, Legal reviews, New Contract Setup, Travel Requests, Finance requests, etc.
Tackling Program Management
With R3’s Program Management for GovCon solution you now have a way to tackle the soft work of program management. It allows you to get going quickly with a core feature set. And, it empowers you to customize your solution to meet the program scenario and the specific needs of the programs/contracts/task orders that you are managing.
Learn more by visiting the R3 Program Management for GovCon section of our web site.