Photo By JoAnne Castagna | Senior Leadership Development Program members research Power BI to improve project...... read more read more
As New York District employees, you’re aware of the critical missions our agency successfully performs for the Nation. Whether it’s strengthening our coasts to withstand the brunt of stronger coastal storms, building facilities for our service men and women, or constructing temporary hospitals in the middle of a world-wide pandemic – our District has always met these challenges and shined.
This is because of you, the District’s greatest asset. As our responsibilities continue to increase, so does the need for a better way to manage our project resources and workload to not only improve the project, but to make your work more manageable and fulfilling.
The District believes it has found this solution in Power BI or Power Business Intelligence, an easy-to-use Microsoft Dashboard. The program takes information from various sources and combines it to create immersive and interactive visuals and tools to help managers and supervisors make more informed decisions concerning their project’s resources and staff and easily share it with others.
Nicholas LoRusso, deputy commander, New York District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said, “Implementing this dashboard aligns with the priorities of the North Atlantic Division. The Division’s number one priority is people. The Division says ‘The Gold Standard is our People!’, as well as using enhanced visualizations such as dashboards, placements, and maps to enable them to make better decisions for their projects and staff across all levels of the organization. I’m proud to say that members of our latest Senior Leadership Development Program are the ones that came up with the innovative idea of using Power BI!”
USACE’s Senior LDP Program is designed to provide progressive avenues toward developing and training leaders at all levels.
As part of this program, members are required to take their newfound knowledge to perform a team project that will help solve a District issue and improve USACE as a whole.
When three members were discussing what they should do they came up with a plan. These members included Philip Dabbagh, an assistant District counsel, New York District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Ahmed Radwan, project manager, New York District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Isaac A. Garcia, geotechnical engineer, New York District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Dabbagh said, “One of the issues that came up was overall project management and creating a program to help the District meet its mission requirements. Then Ahmed came up with the idea of using Power BI to create a visualization tool for managers and supervisors to be able to visually know how their projects are being staffed and resourced.”
Since their discussion, these Senior LDP members have started to develop a visualization tool using Power BI. The tool is going to take data from the Corps of Engineers Financial Management System (CEFMS) and combine it with data from the District’s Project Management System (P2) to help managers and supervisors create shareable visuals that they can analyze to make more informed decisions concerning their project’s resources and staff.
LoRusso said, “This will help us synthesize our project data into workload projections that will help us to allocate resources effectively to deliver projects.”
In the past, this data used to be shown separately. According to Garcia, combining financial data with project scheduling data makes sense. This tool will help leaders make better data driven decisions and better visualize how much money they have for their project’s life cycle including such things as project funds, scheduling, monthly expenditures, hours allocated, and labor rates.
Speaking of labor, this tool will also help leaders better manage their staff and workload. Dabbagh said, “This tool will allow managers and supervisors to see how their employees are being utilized and will allow them to adjust their office’s efforts accordingly and will hopefully allow those offices to run more efficiently in terms of project delivery.”
And whether those offices are down the hall or in another state, it won’t matter. “This tool will help team members working across different divisions with different levels of effort, funding, and time to synchronize their efforts and easily share their visual data,” said Dabbagh.
And this all will be done visually, which Dabbagh believes the District needs. He said, “There’s a lack of visualization in the District with how many of our projects are managed across different offices and divisions, leading to “stove-piping” in terms of having and disseminating information.”
This tool will create visuals such as Pie-charts, stacks line-graph, and tables that will be easily sharable across multiple offices and divisions, managers and supervisors, enabling them to make better informed decisions.
He added, visuals are also better for employees because they are more engaging to the reader and can help communicate complex or dry ideas. “Simply put -- A picture is worth a thousand words.”
The Senior LDP members are still refining their Power BI visualization tool that is expected to be completed soon and will coincide with their December 2024 graduation from the program. Their hope is to lay the groundwork for wider implementation and staff training in the coming months.
Radwan said that this project seems to define why he joined the Senior LDP program in the first place, “I joined because it offers a way to advance my leadership skills, particularly in the areas of influence and inspiration. In my current role with the District, I frequently work with diverse, cross-functional team and partner agencies, where collaboration relies heavily on the ability to build trust, inspire commitment, and influence outcomes. Our visualization tool will help me, and my colleagues do just that.”
As the District’s mission responsibilities grow, increasing the need for resources and employee responsibilities, this visualization tool can help it better face these challenges and continue to successfully serve the Nation.
Dabbagh said, “We expect leadership to gain immensely from having this visualization tool. It will help ensure that resources committed to new projects will be effectively and timely appropriated throughout the District and most importantly it will show leaders how to best use their employees on projects now and into the future.”
| Date Taken: | 12.06.2024 |
| Date Posted: | 12.06.2024 14:24 |
| Story ID: | 486861 |
| Location: | NEW YORK, NEW YORK, US |
| Web Views: | 96 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
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