Digital Transformation Today

How SharePoint Streamlines Managing Federal Contracts

Project management and reporting are highly time-consuming for many federal contractors. Having inefficient processes and tools makes it difficult to ensure accuracy and maintain confidential information. Fortunately, SharePoint offers a number of capabilities that allow government contractors to automate and streamline reporting processes in a secure environment.

First, let’s review some of the top challenges in managing federal contracts:

  1. Compliance with regulatory governance standards: Among government contractors’ main concern related to managing federal contracts is ensuring compliance with the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR). While individual contracts may have specific compliance requirements, with few exceptions, everyone who contracts with the government has to comply with FAR.Tracking and managing documentation related to the contract administration plays a big role in FAR compliance, and can make any potential audit process much less painful.
  2. Detailed project reporting: Contractors need to be able to reconcile specific updates on task orders and deliverables (the status of the products they’re selling) and financial information, such as budget and billing details. Combining these two aspects within project reports is often a tremendous challenge.
  3. Coordinating multiple people: Another challenge for managing contracts is compiling information from several sources and coordinating multiple constituents. The information the contractor needs is typically in different places and with several people. If you don’t have a central repository for the project, it’s difficult to coordinate disparate teams and roll up a composite report. For example, a contractor might receive 10 different spreadsheets via email and then have to manually consolidate the data. This time-consuming aggregation process is inefficient and tends to introduce errors.

Streamlining Reporting Processes With SharePoint

SharePoint offers a number of capabilities that allow government contractors to automate and streamline reporting processes. SharePoint is particularly adept at managing contracts from a project perspective, allowing you to provide project updates and integrate them with financial data and timekeeping. By embedding Project Online or Project Server within a SharePoint site, all your project updates are live for all team members to see in real time.

In addition to bringing all of your updates into one place, a SharePoint site also allows you to centralize project inputs and documents. All of your deliverables and issue lists exist in the same site, alongside milestone tracking, streamlining processes and improving efficiency.

In terms of reporting, a SharePoint project site makes it easy to create a dashboard that aggregates your key performance indicators (KPIs), helping you monitor and communicate the health of the project. This allows representatives from the government agency you’re working for to quickly log in and view the KPIs instead of digging through multiple documents to assess the project’s status.

SharePoint also offers data security advantages, helping you maintain confidential information in federal contracts. It offers ease of use to your project stakeholders, allowing you to secure the site and control information by creating different levels of user access.

To learn more about using SharePoint to streamline processes, contact Portal Solutions