There are four levels of authority mentioned by Silcox (2012)
which exist within all organizations.
- Acting from instruction: The entity follows decisions made by
others at this stage. There's no choice and workers have to do what
they're asked.
- Act after approval: The individual considers factors and acts
only after approval of their preferred action by their
manager;
- Decide, advise, and act: Power to make decisions is introduced,
but citizens remain responsible for another. The individual needs
to remind their supervisor of their acts.
- Decide and act: Gives absolute power and responsibility.
Approval is not needed.
When a PMIS collects and preserves all project data in an
ordered way, it also has to be recoverable, accessible,
categorizable, shareable and analyzable. A standard PMIS should
have a set of methods to do all of this.
- Scheduling and planning: early and late scheduling
computations, slack periods and critical path Resource management:
including inventory preparation, scaling, distribution, etc.
Budget: equate expenditures with specific activities for more
precise calculation and generation of budgets.
- Track and output: Analyze and monitor the cost and results,
adjust current plans against expected data improvements as actual,
provide the project manager with what-if scenarios.
- Reporting and communication: development of data gathered and
evaluated graphs and maps that can be shared with partners and
members of the team.
- Integration and ease of use: For multi-project research, some
PMIS can view data from various programs, merging with other
applications, such as payroll, inventory, etc. The faster it is to
use a PMIS and the less time and energy it costs to practice.