Conseil Départemental: tools to manage your digital projects

Do you work for a Conseil Départemental? Discover the tools you need to implement your digital projects!

Managing a digital transformation plan in a community is a complex task, involving the coordination of numerous projects, resources and stakeholders.

Project portfolio management software such as Project Monitor provides you with a wide range of tools:

• Choosing the right projects, arbitrating IT solution proposals
• Setting up comitology: steering bodies specific to the digital roadmap
• Define the timing of major IT projects by phase and milestone
• Monitor financial management between estimated and actual costs

Here we give you the tools you need to manage your digital projects, from roadmap to completion:

• Monitoring and decision-making tools
• Resource management tools
• Tools for tracking costs
• Tools for monitoring schedules
• Management tools for task management

Would you prefer to discover the tools on video? Watch the replay of our Product Tour dedicated to County Councils!

Choose the right tools to implement the national roadmap for digital inclusion

As you know, "France Numérique Ensemble" is the name of the new national roadmap for the development of digital inclusion in France.

France Numérique thus describes the national orientations in favor of digital inclusion, and the resulting projects, over the period from 2024 to 2027.

Throughout the first half of 2024, your steering committee will work to identify territorial needs in terms of digital inclusion to determine the priority projects to be carried out and the resources needed to make them a reality.

Your roadmap should then include :

• priority projects
• the resources needed to make them a reality
• the necessary budgets

Download the Guide : The keys to implementing your master plan strategy!

In setting up governance, obstacles may appear, such as :

• Lack of visibility on your teams' workloads
• Ensure on-time delivery of projects according to strategic roadmap
• Striking a balance between governance management and project deliverability

The Project Monitor software then becomes a governance tool for managing your digital roadmap.

For example, it supports the CD35 - Conseil Départemental de L'Ille-et-Vilaine :

• Project portfolio reviews for steering bodies
• schedule project phases and milestones linked to the roadmap
• Resource management to avoid overloading
• Tracking costs incurred

Monitoring and decision-making tools

"The project review enables us to provide transparency on the progress of the community's various projects, to ensure strategic alignment to avoid distortion with the contracting authorities, and to contract with the contracting authorities. DGEs and directors are then informed of the master plan and of the decisions taken by elected representatives on the direction to be taken and on arbitration in relation to new projects.

General management now has a real decision-making tool, with comprehensive metrics and indicators integrating the weight of projects."

At Project Monitor, you can use dashboards to get a strategic view of your project portfolio:

• Define key indicators for managing your project portfolios (risk, resources, schedule and budget)
• Manage your portfolios with customized dashboards
• Animate governance bodies in collaborative mode through interactive reports and web slideshows

Resource management tools

"Instead of saying, "We've got a lot of projects, we won't be able to do it", we come up with factual metrics, so many "man-days" estimated on such and such a part (identical to a service company). Thanks to this tool, we can monitor the industrialization of our projects.

At Project Monitor, you have access to a complete range of functions for managing your resources:

• Get an overview of each project, with planned workloads based on available resources.
• Provide resources with a time recording sheet, to give them an overall view of activities carried out in relation to planning, and enable them to identify the "reste-à faire".
• Analyze the time spent on each project, and have a clear view of all workloads, so you can monitor the progress of tasks and schedule.

Tools for tracking costs

"To calculate the costs involved, we used a specific methodology to evaluate the workload required to achieve the ambitions of the digital roadmap. We estimated that we needed as much time on the project management side as on the project implementation side, to be able to implement the digital roadmap with peace of mind."

One of the strong points of what has been put in place at CD35 is the interaction between the Project Monitor software and the financial management software to monitor actual costs.

Indeed, Project Monitor can interface with financial and BI tools such as Coriolis, Power BI or Qlik.

At Project Monitor, you can monitor project costs and budget execution:

• Define and plan expenditure forecasts by month/quarter/year or financial year.
• Manage your project budgets with dashboards that provide a complete overview of budget consumption, by project, entity or portfolio.
• Track your commitments, re-estimate budgets and visualize the remaining budget

Manage projects linked to the digital strategy for education

The Digital Strategy for Education 2023-2027 is based on a series of measures to strengthen students' digital skills and accelerate the use of digital tools for student success:

• Definition and management of roadmaps with all departments
• Implementation strategy with phases and milestones
• Sharing indicators for steering and evaluation purposes Budget tracking between estimates and actuals

For example, Project Monitor is helping the Haute-Savoie department structure its digital strategy for secondary schools:

• Planning with phases and milestones
• Follow-up indicators
• Task management
• Flash report & coordination meetings

"There are a lot of requests from secondary schools to the Education & Youth division, the Buildings and Resources division. Colleges often need work, cabling, wifi, tablets...
We use Project Monitor to run monthly meetings and keep track of interactions between the actions of these divisions. The Flash report serves as a support for coordination meetings.

Tools for monitoring schedules

With Project Monitor , you can plan and track the progress of your projects in a simple, interactive and collaborative way.

Thanks to our online Gantt, you can easily organize the different phases and milestones of your projects, assign responsibilities and track the progress of each stage in real time.

Management tools for task management

Task management is useful from both an operational and strategic point of view. For COPIL organization, the project portfolio review shows the manager the weather indicators (including stormy projects). He can then go to the Kanban function and filter "in progress" and "stormy" projects to quickly identify the tasks concerned. Kanban is an invaluable tool for taking stock of tasks and preparing the portfolio review for the steering committee.

The advantages of the Kanban board via Project Monitor :

• Templates when creating tasks for a common methodology
• Card details: type, status, assigned, expiry date, priority
• Filter by status
• Filter by priority
• Filter by member
• Consolidated attribute in column header (encryption/velocity...)