Transparent Program Management: Confidence, Pride and Peace of Mind

by Andy Dykstra

photo: Installing illuminated exterior letterset for AECOM 30 stories above the Los Angeles skyline.

Your Window to Business Sign Installation Success

You may be a Fortune 1,000 CMO, VP of real estate services, or construction executive charged with building the bank of the future or rolling out the new brand signage related to a recent merger. If this, or something similar is your task, you probably have three things top-of-mind while overseeing the business sign installation program at hundreds of your locations:

1. Finishing the project on time, consistently implemented across all company touch points at every location.
2. Verifying that all the business signs look great, are on brand and reliably conform to program standards.
3. Completing the entire business sign installation program within budget.

You may also be thinking that if all three were accomplished, it would be a notable achievement and a very positive contribution to your company's success.

Transparent Program Management

Having worked in the industry for 20+ years and operated many project management systems, I know how difficult it can be to achieve the above. I’ve seen many projects fall short.

Although the reasons vary, too often the project management and processes become obstacles to project success.

In your experience, you may have also observed one aspect of program management that contributes heavily to project failure; a lack of transparency. Without transparency, communication problems confound stakeholders, delays pile up and blame starts to flow.

So, what does transparent program management look like and how does it help business sign installation projects?

Transparent program management exists where you and all your site coordinators see the same things the sign company project managers see. I’m talking about purchase orders, site surveys, photos, designs, notes, permits and approvals, and other relevant project data.

And significantly, you see it all as it happens, in real-time, not a day or two after the fact. After all, you don’t want to call the sign company PM every day to see if you’ve finally got permits in Pittsburg.

Transparency Facilitates Success

Program management transparency contributes to project success in three ways.

• First, seeing project events in real-time enables you to address problems faster and with confidence, empowering you to stay on schedule.
• Second, knowing everything about a site means that fewer things get off track, improving program consistency and fostering pride in the results.
• And finally, seeing orders and costs reported from real-time data constrains key personnel to stay within budget, providing welcome peace of mind for the duration of the project.

Additionally, since you own the data, all the information relating to the project, such as branch surveys, remains accessible for future documentation. That’s a nice benefit that keeps paying dividends long after the sign installation project is complete.

ProjectPilot™

Program management transparency doesn’t come easily. However, Priority’s wholly transparent project management capabilities never fail to impress. How do they do it?

Unlike the other sign companies that I’ve known, Priority’s project managers live and breathe in ProjectPilot™, the company’s comprehensive and proprietary, real-time program management customer interface.

In addition to keeping customers updated in real time, ProjectPilot™ is also the system that processes purchase orders and tracks costs. Remarkably, it doubles as the company’s ERP system. It’s how project managers at Priority professionally manage their day.

Through ProjectPilot™, your executives and managers interact directly with the sign installation project managers and the project data.

You’ve got a window into the project manager’s world.

Collaboration comes more easily. For example, the PM can email you a design link to simultaneously view details online in ProjectPilot. That beats flipping through documents, attempting to be on the same page of the same version.