Enhancing project performance evaluation at MOVYON S.p.A. Development, implementation, and practical application of the Monitoring and Reporting Dashboard

In today’s dynamic work landscape, Project Management stands as a critical component driving companies’ competitiveness across diverse sectors. The establishment of dedicated Project Management departments underscores the growing significance of this discipline, which encompasses planning, execution, and oversight to achieve predetermined goals. Within this context, monitoring, controlling, and reporting practices are essential, enabling companies to drive successful outcomes. Recognizing the need for enhanced project performance evaluation, MOVYON S.p.A., an Autostrade per l’Italia’s spin-off dedicated to Intelligent Transport Systems, challenged the author with the creation of a visualization tool, more specifically a dashboard, to better assess projects’ performances. This thesis addresses this challenge, focusing on the development and implementation of the dashboard within MOVYON’s Project Management framework. Real-life case studies demonstrate its utility in monitoring and reporting project advancement, economic aspects, and delivery dates. The thesis comprises seven chapters organized as follows. In the first one, a proper theoretical contextualization is presented by addressing both the Project Management discipline and the literature on dashboards as monitoring and reporting instruments. Chapter 2 explores the company that constitute the environment within which the model has been created: MOVYON S.p.A. In Chapter 3, MOVYON’s Project Management process has been reported together with a description of the main company’s difficulties which the dashboard aspires to partially solve. Chapter 4 concentrates on three main aspects: the presentation of all the instruments that were used to obtain the final result, namely Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Power BI and Microsoft Power Query, the thorough narration of the modus operandi followed to achieve the intended outcome, and the aesthetic description of the visuals constituting the dashboard. Chapter 5 summarizes the main practical implementation steps that were physically required in order to obtain the final model’s graphs. Chapter 6 continues the exposition by describing the practical application of the visuals to three of MOVYON’s projects for which the visualizations are analyzed in a manner that allows to exemplify both the monitoring and reporting intents of the implemented tool. Finally, Chapter 7 concludes the dissertation, first by reporting all the benefits that the model contributes to realize within the company, then by presenting the main limitations that may ultimately lead to the dashboard abandonment and, finally, by enumerating the future steps for improvement. This monitoring and reporting instrument serves as a standardized tool for evaluating project performances uniformly, empowering project managers with comprehensive insights through graphical representations. While the dashboard marks a significant step toward fostering a cooperative organizational structure, limitations such as rigidity and lack of responsiveness necessitate attention. Despite these constraints, this instrument represents a valuable prototype, with potential for future development and integration into a more comprehensive Project Portfolio Management tool. To overcome limitations and fully capitalize on benefits, implementing a dashboard 2.0 with skilled expertise is crucial, addressing structural issues, obtaining necessary licenses, and incorporating user feedback for dynamic and effective project evaluation at MOVYON.