Blue Ant - Your Project Management Office Support

The PMO (Project Management Office) is the central instance in multi-project management, where all threads of all projects come together. So, one of the most important tasks of the PMO is to provide an efficient framework, for example, in the form of a suitable PMO software solution such as Blue Ant.

The PMO often primarily takes on a monitoring role to ensure that minimum requirements are met and that the quality of a project is maintained. The PMO can support the setup of projects, by briefing the project management, helping them to create the project, realistically planning a project or setting up the required reporting. The PMO does not intervene operationally in ongoing projects, however.

Developed as a software solution for the management of large project portfolios, Blue Ant increases the efficiency of your PMO. Our tool helps you to use the available resources of your PMO more efficiently and to reduce costs. Blue Ant provides your program management with a clearly structured program dashboard that gives you a transparent overview of the entire project landscape at a glance.

If your PMO structures projects into one or more portfolios, Blue Ant provides support with a clear and intuitive portfolio dashboard. In addition to a clear structure, this dashboard also helps your PMO to monitor your project portfolios. Are milestones and agreed minimum documentation requirements being met? Are status reports being submitted properly? And much more.

What would happen if...?

If your PMO is also responsible for setting up the portfolios, running through "What if..." scenarios is a necessary measure to be able to identify bottlenecks early on and meet deadlines. Blue Ant provides your PMO with the necessary tools to create, adapt and evaluate various simulations. You can weigh up all eventualities right at the start of strategic planning and schedule events on the basis of all currently available data.

In this way, you fully evaluate capacities and budgets before making decisions that affect your entire project landscape. Afterwards, Blue Ant's controlling and reporting features help you evaluate and assess your project or portfolio.

Project life cycle: The maturing of a project

One of the most important and powerful features of Blue Ant as a PMO tool is the complete mapping of the project life cycle of all upcoming, ongoing and completed projects. Maintain an overview of the maturity of all projects at all times. Decide whether individual projects are worth implementing. Monitor the various stages of the "maturing" of your projects: From clarifying the assignment to strategic assessment, project planning, and milestones in your project implementation to project completion.

This way, your PMO can define and standardise suitable processes and workflows for different project categories in Blue Ant. This ensures that each project passes through binding quality gates and that important decisions and evaluations are made on the basis of the dual control principle instead of instinctively.

With Blue Ant, you can optimally map the project life cycle of a large number of projects simultaneously. But where does the data come from? Your PMO can either gather it in Blue Ant or easily obtain it from other systems via interfaces.

Blue Ant also provides your PMO with useful tools to support resource management in your projects. Both the management and line need adequate statements regarding the availability or utilisation of all available resources, whether staff or materials.

As a PMO tool, Blue Ant helps you to prepare and evaluate all relevant information from the line projects - personnel data, absences, work-times, etc. - in a condensed form and to make it available to the appropriate departments in the company for resource planning.

Knowledge management for team planning

Blue Ant's knowledge management is also a valuable tool for planning your resources, especially for putting together effective project teams. With it, your PMO can search for the currently required skill profiles among your employees with just a few clicks and quickly put together the right personnel in project teams. Of course, the available capacities and the workload of the respective persons are displayed and recognised by Blue Ant.

The PMO already has all the important information so that your project management can apply for the required resources from the respective managers. Of course, this can also be done directly in Blue Ant with just a few mouse clicks. For reliable planning, important resources can also be reserved in advance.

Here, your PMO once again has a watchdog function: if, for example, a project is pending that threatens to cut into the resources of other projects, Blue Ant provides the PMO with the necessary tools to intervene in a protective manner at an early stage. For this purpose, Blue Ant has various functions, such as utilisation graphs, which help you to recognise such bottlenecks at an early stage and to react appropriately.