“ePMS, an On-line Project Management System for Karnataka tracks the projects involving investment 100 crore to 1000 crore. It enhances the efficiency, bring transparency and improve the communication between industries to Government and State to Centre or vice versa. It automates the entire tracking of stalled investment projects in the context of the bottlenecks. Industries can submit their projects with issues after creating their login credentials. When any project with issues is being added by an industry to the State PMG, the portal shall automatically push the data to the respective ministries at the state level. Once the project is being endorsed by State level Nodal Officer, it shall also be automatically routed to the Central PMG, if there are any issues/bottlenecks related to Govt. of India. Industries get the immediate response from the automatic mailer and they can see the current status of concerned projects through this platform immediately after the subgroup meeting is over if the decision being entered on-line”

            In this context, a Training workshop on ePMS On-line Project Management System Portal was organized for Govt. of Karnataka at Karnataka Udyog Mitra, Bangalore on 04th and 05th July 2014. The program was chaired by Mr. K. A. Jayananda, Managing Director, Karnataka Udyog Mitra, Govt. of Karnataka.

Training program started at 10:15 AM at central conference room, Mr. K. A. Jayananda gave the welcome address followed by introductory speech by Mr. D. C. Bijalwan, Under Secretary, Govt. of India. He gave the description about the project and the various achievements made by the PMG group during the last one year through the e-PMS. Then Mr. Vinod Kr. J, Scientist-B, NIC provided the technical insight of the e-PMS portal of Karnataka followed by the audio/visual presentation for both Admin user and the private entrepreneur.

Then Mr. Vinod gave the complete demonstration about the working of the Karnataka portal regarding the roles of ministry users. During the demo the real names examples were used to better connect with the users. Then for the better explanation a real time project example was discussed to give them the better insight of the decision making process during the meetings and loading of minutes in system for the resolution of the issues. After this the admin role was also explained to give them the complete insight of the process followed by the lunch break at 01:30 PM.

After lunch the session resumed at 2:15 PM for the purpose of hands on for the ministry users. During the hands on session, all the users were divided in to 4 groups having 3-4 members, all members were provided with to-do list which has the list of options which participants would be trying in accordance to their respective roles. The procedure for connecting, logging and other aspects were explained by Mr. Amar Arora, STA, NIC along with the username, passwords, and their respective roles under display on the projector screen. During the hands on the actual adding of projects, acceptance by the sponsoring and comments made by the recipient, searching projects etc. were also tried by the users with the help of Mr. Vinod and Mr. Amar. The individual queries and doubts were also taken up and resolved during the hands on session. Then at 04:50 PM the day was called closed with a vote of thanks to all the ministry users and collection of feedbacks from all the participants. 

On second day i.e. 05th July 2014, the session started at 10:00 AM, as informed to us the presence of some new ministry users have come, which could not come due to some emergency admin work in their ministries were made to briefly explain their respective roles and quick demonstration of ministry users. Then after that the admin module was demonstrated which includes accept/reject/referred back the project/issues submitted by the sponsoring and recipient ministries, generating and sending agenda on-line, entering decision on-line when the PMG subgroup meeting is going on, generating various types of reports and graphical charts for monitoring purpose. In the technical session requirement of admin module, functional role and responsibility were elaborated in detail followed by lunch at 1:00 PM. The session resumed at 2:00 PM for the hands on for the admin users in which the first hour the query resolution was done by Mr. Amar, while Mr. Vinod assisted one of the ministry user to submit a project which is having issues with the central government. Then the actual hands on was initiated on the projects submitted by the ministry users last day, with the creation of master data, agenda creation and entering decisions etc. The day was called with vote of thanks by Mr. K. A. Jayananda and closing comments by Mr. Bijalwan and Mr. Vinod.