Chief of Party or Project Director
TAMIS was designed first and foremost to assist the Chief of Party in managing the resources of his or her team to meet the objectives of the project work plan. Thus, the work plan is the basic building block of the system. It is entered into TAMIS along with the specific outputs and milestones for which the team is responsible. In the course of their daily work, team members enter information on progress made on the specific tasks they have been assigned. Regardless of the location of team members, the Chief of Party has a reliable vehicle for monitoring their progress and for making valuable contributions to their work.

Technical Assistance Team
Frequently, development projects have several different components that are expected to build off of one another and create synergies. This can be difficult when staff are operating in different locations with different audiences, and frequent meetings are costly and time intensive. TAMIS provides a vehicle for information to be shared among these team members and for facilitating a virtual dialogue. Meetings that do take place end up being more productive because team members are better informed.

Project Support Staff
TAMIS has an extensive module to assist the project support staff in performing and tracking the volume of administrative tasks on a project. Depending on the needs of the project, administrators use the system for a wide variety of tasks, including mobilizing and monitoring short-term technical assistance, tracking level of effort of the team and subcontractors, initiating and tracking procurement, monitoring the status of approvals, and facilitating project start-up and planning close-down.

Client
DAI’s clients have an enormous stake in ensuring that the limited funds available for development are in fact devoted to activities that produce an impact. For this reason, monitoring and evaluation activities are critical to most projects. Impact and performance monitoring is a fundamental piece of what TAMIS does, and for this reason, DAI provides access to TAMIS to all of our clients. Usually through the Internet, our clients are provided a window into our information system that allows them to assess, on an ongoing basis, progress being made. As a result, although TAMIS does not eliminate paper reporting requirements, it makes it much less burdensome and keeps our clients better informed. And hard copy reports that are required can be produced automatically with no further data entry.

Counterparts and Stakeholders
Through the Internet, DAI can engage a much wider audience in our activities and share information on an ongoing basis. This feature has been used in a variety of ways, including promoting and supporting collaborative planning efforts, reviewing terms of reference and scopes of work, sharing publications, monitoring partnerships and loan production, and tracking legislation and government policy issues.