Coronavirus (COVID-19) is forcing companies to work remotely during these uncertain times. Unfortunately, most project-based companies are not equipped to do this. Of course, much of the hands-on construction and manufacturing work is being paused. However, many engineering and professional service firms do not have the capabilities to do their work and manage their projects remotely even though they should.
Why? They are not set up to take advantage of the cloud.
If you are like most Project Businesses, you have many different systems and applications to run your business. These apps include project scheduling, project costing, estimating and budgeting, ERP, time and expense, and many more. Plus, it most certainly includes lots of spreadsheets.
Many of these applications are not cloud-ready. That means they may not be accessible remotely, or the applications and files themselves could be sitting on someone’s desktop in the office, completely cut off from the rest of the organization.
Disparate apps and data make it extremely difficult to take advantage of the cloud.
In this setup, your data is spread all over the place. Your ability to integrate, share and present that data is compromised in these remote working conditions. Furthermore, you do not have real-time visibility into your business, so you have no idea how this economic dip is affecting your projects right now.
The reason many Project Businesses have not taken advantage of the cloud is because of this very setup. With all these disparate apps, where do you start? How should you move to the cloud?
The short video above makes the point that Project Businesses need to rethink their cloud strategy. Instead of taking what you have and simply replicating it to the cloud, look for ways to consolidate and integrate your business systems.
Of course, PBA is not an emergency application. It is not something you buy and implement in a week.
However, with the onset of COVID-19, we all must recognize that our current emergency environment is not only possible, but inevitable. We should take this time to prepare our organizations for the future. Maybe we should take a step back and think about how to re-prioritize and restructure our business activities in a way that sets us up for success when things are back to “normal” and helps us weather the uncertain times in the future.
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