The WIP is normally seen as the one of the significant financial documents that financial and corporate leaders utilize to determine current and future financial health. It is difficult, however, to have tremendous faith in the data it contains as so much of it is contributed to by operations. This is a significant challenge as there appears to be a lack of financial training in the operations side of our industry, leading to less focused, and certainly less accurate, data landing on the WIP statement. For the WIP and project forecasts to be utilized not just as a financial instrument, but as a tool to depict the performance of each and every project, collaboration and education is beyond critical.
Learning objectives:
- Discuss why math and hope do not mix in predicting project performance
- Understand the use of data to calculate project financial standing
- Utilize WIP metrics to identify projects requiring intervention and/or recovery plans
- Review the use of reports and dashboards to highlight key performance indicators
- Define the necessary capture of the causes of margin changes in order to ensure proactive project management and enterprise level learning